The Champs Start Sixth: Walking the 2026 Preseason AP Top 25

Start with the number that tells you everything about college football in 2026. It is not the 1 next to Ohio State. It is the 6 next to Indiana. The defending national champions — the program that beat Miami 27-21 in January, hung the first football banner in school history, and turned the sport's most reliable punchline into its last team standing — open the season ranked sixth in the preseason AP Top 25. Five teams start ahead of the champs. That is not an insult aimed at Bloomington. That is an audit of how deep this sport has become, and it makes this August's poll the most entertaining preseason document in years. Walk it top to bottom and every tier has its own personality.

The penthouse belongs to Ohio State, and there is no scandal in it. The Buckeyes won the first 12-team College Football Playoff in January 2025, and Ryan Day has built the kind of roster machine that voters now treat as the sport's baseline. When most of the AP's 65 ballots agree in August, that is not groupthink. That is a program that has spent years earning the benefit of every doubt. No. 1 in the preseason is less a prediction than a dare: prove the default wrong.

Oregon at No. 2 completes the Big Ten's opening statement. Dan Lanning's Ducks went unbeaten through their first Big Ten regular season in 2024 and have recruited like a program that considers the top five a permanent address. Right behind them sits the old guard: Kirby Smart's Georgia at 3, holding the SEC's flag at the front of the line, and Marcus Freeman's Notre Dame at 4, an independent parked in the middle of a conference argument like a neutral country hosting the peace talks. Steve Sarkisian's Texas rounds out the top five, and the fact that a top-five Texas team feels almost routine now tells you how far that rebuild has traveled.

Then comes the poll's best inside joke: Indiana at 6 and Miami at 7, the January title game re-parked side by side in the rankings like the two of them never left the field. Curt Cignetti arrived from James Madison after the 2023 season, inherited a program with no history of this, and within two years delivered a national championship. Now his reward is a five-spot handicap and a schedule full of teams that spent the offseason watching Indiana celebrate. Miami, meanwhile, starts one spot back of the team that beat it, which is either poetic or cruel depending on which fan base you ask.

Zoom out and the poll becomes a census war. The SEC placed nine teams: Georgia at 3, Texas at 5, Texas A&M at 8, Ole Miss at 9, Oklahoma at 10, LSU at 11, Alabama at 13, Tennessee at 20, and Missouri at 25. The Big Ten placed seven: Ohio State at 1, Oregon at 2, Indiana at 6, Michigan at 16, Washington at 17, Penn State at 18, and Iowa at 22. So the SEC wins the head count, and it is not close. But the Big Ten holds Nos. 1 and 2, the defending champion at 6, and the actual trophy. One league owns the census. The other owns the penthouse and the hardware. That argument is going to run clear through Thanksgiving.

The 8-through-11 stretch is pure SEC muscle memory. Texas A&M at 8 gets the annual vote of confidence in College Station's talent stockpile. Ole Miss at 9 opens with a ranked visitor — No. 24 Louisville comes to Oxford in Week 1 — which means the Rebels get a resume audition before September even settles in. Oklahoma at 10 is the voters betting on the brand finding its SEC footing. And LSU at 11 might have the most electric opening act in the sport: Clemson comes to Baton Rouge on the first Saturday night of the season, Death Valley hosting Death Valley, a name-brand collision that will move somebody ten spots in one evening.

Now the screenshot line: Texas Tech at 12, one spot ahead of Alabama at 13. Read that again slowly. Lubbock opens the season looking down at Tuscaloosa. The voters put real money on Texas Tech this August, and a program that has spent most of its existence as the Big 12's chaos agent now gets treated like a genuine contender. And Alabama at 13 is its own story — not a takedown, just a snapshot of a sport where the field got faster. When the most decorated brand of the century opens 13th and nobody riots, the parity is not a talking point anymore. It is the weather.

The middle class has range. USC and BYU share No. 14, a tie that pairs the Coliseum with Provo and lets both fan bases claim momentum. Michigan at 16 and Washington at 17 sit back to back, which is a quiet little Easter egg: those two met in the national championship game in January 2024, and now they are neighbors in the poll's middle third, both rebuilding toward another swing. Penn State at 18 brings six figures of Beaver Stadium noise and a fan base that considers 18th a personal affront. Sometimes the poll's most combustible tier is not the top ten. It is the teams that believe they belong there.

The final stretch is where the sport's new money shows up. SMU at 19 is the ACC's freshest arrival acting like it has been at the table for decades — the Dallas program has crashed the rankings and intends to stay. Tennessee at 20 keeps the SEC's count climbing. Utah at 21 restores a familiar name to the page. Iowa at 22 is the poll's most dependable genre: a defense, a punter, and a rock fight waiting for you in November. Houston at 23 gives the Big 12 another riser, Louisville at 24 gets an immediate chance to cash its ranking in Oxford, and Missouri slides in at 25, the census-taker's last tally for the SEC's nine.

Here is the thing about August polls: they are starting lines, not verdicts. The AP has been taking this temperature since 1936, and the preseason ballot has always been one part evaluation, one part reputation, one part educated guess. Voters will spend September correcting it in real time. But where you start matters, because polls move incrementally — teams climb past the bodies in front of them one result at a time. Indiana does not need a pundit's blessing. It needs the five teams above it to lose, or the chance to beat them.

So sit with the absurdity one more time. The defending national champion opens sixth. The runner-up opens seventh. Alabama opens behind Texas Tech. Nine SEC teams and seven Big Ten teams are about to spend three months arguing over one bracket. The first ballots are in, Week Zero kicks off August 29 with a noon window that starts in Dublin, and by the middle of September this whole beautiful document will be obsolete. That is not a flaw. That is the point. The poll is the argument, and the argument is the sport.