Inside the AP Poll: Five-pack of title contenders emerges; Northwestern in for first time since 2020
· Yahoo Sports
The cream is rising to the top in college football once more.
Oh, Georgia’s the No. 1 team in the country again? That’s not terribly surprising, not as long as Kirby Smart is calling the shots in Athens. Which he is.
And Alabama is also one of the best teams in the country? Because Kalen DeBoer is one of the game’s best coaches? Even though he’s not Nick Saban? Is water wet?
Ohio State has the best player in college football, and the Buckeyes look like national championship contenders again, per usual — despite that fourth-quarter blip against Texas.
Miami and Notre Dame remain largely untested but on a collision course for an epic Nov. 7 meeting in South Bend, where one team could cement itself as the national title favorite.
The new AP poll reflects the growing consensus that those five teams have separate themselves from the rest of the sport. That’s not to say that Indiana or Texas or Utah isn’t capable of winning a national title. They could certainly be among the teams playing into January. But that top five looks like the top tier of the sport — for now.
Meanwhile … Oregon has dropped out of the Top 25, and rightfully so. LSU is close to being unranked, too, after its second loss of the year. The Ducks were a popular preseason pick to win it all, and Lane Kiffin entered the season with College Football Playoff expectations as well. I consider Oregon eliminated from the CFP race, and LSU has its back against the wall now, with games against Alabama, Texas and Tennessee still to go.
The sport and its premier conferences are flipped on their head a bit! UCLA is the No. 12 team in the country. Kentucky and Mississippi State both sit inside the top 20. Northwestern is ranked! The usual suspects may be staking their claim to the top spots in the AP Top 25, but we’ve got some fresh and exciting squads filling out the rest of the poll these days.
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Stray thoughts/observations:
- Wake Forest has finally broken into the AP Top 25! I’ve been ranking the Demon Deacons for weeks now, but it’s taken longer for my fellow voters to realize that Wake might be the second-best team in the ACC. That also boosts Miami’s resume with a now-top 25 win.
- Texas Tech is not the 10th-best team in the country, and I don’t even think the Red Raiders are the second-best team in the Big 12. But all of that will have to work itself out later, because Tech doesn’t face either Utah or BYU in the regular season.
- It’s very defensible, at least to me, to drop Texas a few spots behind Ohio State. I had them separated by more space than the official poll does, but I’m sure my peers felt similarly to me. That loss to Oklahoma is so much worse than Ohio State’s one loss that it drops them into a different grouping of teams from the current Buckeyes’ grouping. Ohio State’s win over Iowa on the road continues to look better as well, as the Hawkeyes inch up the poll.
- The new poll sets up two monster matchups next weekend — a top-five showdown pitting the last two national champions against each other in Bloomington, and a top-10 matchup between Notre Dame and BYU in Provo. We’d watch this game