AP Top 25 Preseason Poll 2026: Ohio State Takes No. 1, Big Ten Owns the Ceiling, SEC Owns the Depth

The wait is over: the first AP Top 25 poll of the 2026 college football season dropped Monday at noon ET, and it sets the table for a season that is officially 12 days from kickoff. Ohio State opens at No. 1 with 40 of 69 first-place votes — the first time the Buckeyes have held the preseason top spot since 2015 — but this poll is less a coronation than a warning label. Oregon, Georgia, Notre Dame and Texas round out a heavyweight top five, a defending national champion sits at No. 6, and the SEC flexes more ranked teams than any conference in the country while failing to land a single first-place vote. Here's everything that matters in the 2026 preseason AP Top 25.

Full AP Top 25 Preseason Rankings

The complete 2026 AP Top 25 preseason poll, with points and first-place votes from the 69-member media panel:

Poll released Aug. 17, 2026, by the Associated Press.

The Top Five: A Big Ten Power Move

Ohio State's return to the No. 1 spot comes with 1,672 points and a 40-vote cushion over Oregon's 1,597. The Ducks collected 14 first-place votes of their own, giving the Big Ten the top two teams in the preseason poll for just the second time ever. That is the defining storyline of the 2026 preseason: the sport's perceived power center has moved, and it wears Big Ten logos.

Behind them, Georgia sits third at 1,513 points, followed by Notre Dame at 1,510 with six first-place votes and Texas at 1,483. The Longhorns know exactly how fragile a preseason ranking can be — last year they opened at No. 1 for the first time in program history, stumbled in the opener at Ohio State, and finished 10-3. For Texas, the No. 5 slot is both a compliment and a trap. Georgia, meanwhile, is chasing its first national title since going back-to-back in 2022-23, a drought that now stretches into a third season for a program that treats anything less than a championship as a failure.

Indiana's Title Defense Gets Its Respect

Perhaps the most fascinating team in the entire poll is No. 6 Indiana. The Hoosiers are the defending national champions — still a surreal sentence to type — and Curt Cignetti's program collected eight first-place votes, the third-most of any team in the country. Voters clearly believe last season was no fluke. Indiana's 1,440 points put it just 70 behind Texas, and the Hoosiers headline an eight-team Big Ten contingent that is the conference's largest in the poll since the league absorbed the Pac-12's remnants.

Miami rounds out the top seven at No. 7 with a single first-place vote, the only ACC team to earn one. From there, the poll gets thick with SEC muscle: Texas A&M at No. 8, Ole Miss at No. 9, Oklahoma at No. 10, LSU at No. 11, and Alabama all the way down at No. 13. Texas Tech checks in at a program-best No. 12, and BYU and USC are deadlocked at No. 14 — the kind of tie that will resolve itself the first Saturday the games actually count.

The SEC's Depth vs. Its Ceiling

Here is the sharpest tension in the 2026 preseason landscape: the SEC leads all conferences with nine ranked teams — Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Oklahoma, LSU, Alabama, Tennessee (No. 20), Missouri (No. 25), plus Texas and Georgia in the top five — yet no SEC team received a single first-place vote. The conference has not reached the national championship game since Georgia's 2023 title run, and the voters' message is clear: the SEC is deep, but nobody in it is clearly the best team in America.

That creates a fascinating setup for futures bettors. The SEC's national title odds are spread across a half-dozen teams rather than concentrated on one, which historically means value for anyone willing to bet the field against a Big Ten favorite. Ohio State carries the biggest target in the sport after overhauling a defense that lost standouts like Arvell Reese, Caleb Downs and Sonny Styles — and the Buckeyes also play one of the toughest schedules in the country. The last time a preseason No. 1 actually finished with a title was Alabama in 2017; USC in 2004 is the only other program this century to pull it off. History is not kind to the August favorite, and Ohio State's path includes enough landmines to make that a live angle all season.

The Rest of the Poll and the Snubs

Michigan opens at No. 16, Washington at No. 17, Penn State at No. 18 and SMU at No. 19 — a Group of Five-turned-ACC program getting its due after last year's playoff run. Utah (No. 21), Iowa (No. 22), Houston (No. 23) and Louisville (No. 24) round out the ranked field, with Missouri sneaking into the final slot at No. 25.

As always, the snubs are almost as loud as the rankings. Clemson led all unranked teams with 112 points, just missing the cut, with Florida next at 51. Boise State was the closest Group of Five program, landing 43 points after finishing No. 28 overall — the Broncos face early tests at Oregon and against Memphis before conference play. No Group of Five team made the preseason poll at all, a reminder that the playoff's access path will have to be earned on the field, not gifted in August.

For everyone else, the message is the same as it always is this time of year: rankings in August decide nothing. But they do tell us exactly where the sport's smartest observers think the power lies — and right now, that power sits in the Big Ten, with the SEC's depth lurking one bad Saturday away from a takeover.

Written by

Lauren Mitchell

College Sports Writer

Lauren Mitchell covers sports with a focus on roster movement, coaching trends, player development, and the bigger storylines behind each matchup.