A college football tradition: coming up with top-25 rankings for the next season as soon as one ends. Let’s get to it!
The consensus way-too-early college football top 25 for 2018 looks something like this
We mashed together a bunch of different early rankings into one top 25, with eight months of offseason to go.
Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Combining a few ballots from around SB Nation (SBNation.com, Rocky Top Talk, Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician) and way-too-early rankings by Athlon, CBS, ESPN, Fox, Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Yahoo! Sports, plus early national title odds by the Westgate in Las Vegas, gives us a top 25 something like this (and, spoiler alert, the preseason AP Poll in August will look a lot like this as well):
Combining a bunch of top 25s into one, we get:
- Alabama
- Clemson
- Georgia
- Ohio State
- Wisconsin
- Oklahoma
- Auburn
- Miami
- Penn State
- Michigan
- Washington
- USC
- Michigan State
- Stanford
- Virginia Tech
- Notre Dame
- LSU
- Florida State
- West Virginia
- Texas
- Boise State
- UCF
- TCU
- Mississippi State
- Oklahoma State
The defending national champ ranking No. 1 is pretty normal, as long as it didn’t go and do a thing like lose a starting QB or something like that. Both Alabama and Georgia lose a ton on defense and at running back, but they remain loaded with talent, raw and otherwise. And now Bama looks even scarier than anticipated, with rising true sophomore QB Tua Tagovailoa up and winning a damn title out of nowhere.
Clemson ranking so highly is interesting, considering the Tigers’ potential NFL losses, but three straight Playoff trips and a returning QB in Kelly Bryant: hard to top.
Ohio State’s kind of always just penciled into these things. Sure!
After that, there are few teams screaming out to be ranked in the top five. Oklahoma loses arguably its two best players on each side of the ball. Auburn feels too high, with its already-struggling offensive line now replacing a lot, but brings back QB Jarrett Stidham. I really like Michigan State, USC, and Washington so far but wouldn’t rank them a whole lot higher than they are in here.
Michigan and Texas will draw some cackles, but Michigan’s 2017 was long considered a rebuilding year, and the Horns add a lot of freshman talent to a roster that loses few pieces.
Yep, self-declared defending champ UCF is unlikely to start next season too far into the teens. That’s not too bad, considering it lost its entire coaching staff and some key defenders. But the Knights might score about a billion points with all that experience and another offense-friendly head coach in Josh Heupel.
What do you think?
See More:
