Round Up the Usual Suspects

It's been 84 years since Captain Renault said it in Casablanca, and college football in August is no less cynical than he was.

Look across the poll and you'll see the same reflex. Ohio State (+4), Georgia (+3), Texas (+7), Notre Dame (+4), Michigan (+7), USC (+4)—every one of them climbing back toward their blue-blooded spot from where they finished in the final AP poll of 2025. Not one of them earned it on a field. It's August, everybody remembered who signs the five-stars, and the usual suspects got rounded up.

The sharpest move on the board is two teams going opposite directions over one man: Lane Kiffin. LSU didn't get a single vote in the final AP poll. They're 8th here. Ole Miss finished the season 3rd and checks in at 13th. That's a 28-spot swing that walked out the door with him. Unfortunately for Ole Miss, the Lane Train is still on the tracks. It just only runs where he's calling plays.

Then there's Indiana. 16-0. Every first-place vote in the country. The best season any program had. And they land 4th, at roughly a third of Ohio State's score. The champs are getting less respect than a 12-2 team that they beat.

Yawn, apparently.

We'll see. Reinforcements are coming on the DL (Daley) and at RB (Wyatt). But we're skeptics by trade, and there's a case: Hoover replacing a Heisman winner who went No. 1 overall, plus close scrapes with Penn State, Iowa and Miami that could have gone the other way. So there's a story here. There's also a bulletin board, and I'd bet the house Coach Cig has already printed out the Coaches Poll for his troops.

The Cliff

A pundit recently said that we don't have a number one team. We have 6 number two teams.

We see it differently. Ohio State has more certainty around it than anyone in the sport right now, with Oregon and Georgia behind it in Tier 1. Then Indiana, Texas, Notre Dame and Miami.

Then a chasm.

The drop from Miami to the next team down is a 63% cliff in a single step. Everywhere else the teams bleed into each other.

It's far too early to say we have a 12-team Playoff and only seven teams worth putting in it. But 8 through 30 is Renault waving at the room. Alabama was 9th in the final poll and they're 9th here, perfectly, hilariously stuck. We can't pick anybody in that tier out of a lineup, and that's exactly what the season is for.

The drama, the arguments, the fireworks, the pageantry. It's August. We spot the ball this month.

It's all back. We are so back.

How our FBS Resume MaxDiff poll works

Each voter evaluated a balanced sequence of four-team sets, choosing the team expected to finish with the strongest year-end résumé and the team expected to finish with the weakest. A voter could record a familiarity skip instead of guessing.

After the poll closed, eligible choices were fit with the frozen symmetric MaxDiff model. Uncertainty and tier stability were estimated by resampling whole voters 2,000 times. Familiarity skips and repeat screens were not treated as additional preference choices.