AP Preseason Poll 2026: The Absence of Surprises Is the Story

The AP preseason poll landed Monday and the most interesting thing about it is that nothing in it is interesting. Ohio State first, Oregon second, and one of the sharpest analytics voices in the sport went on the big afternoon radio show and essentially shrugged: no surprises anywhere in the 25. When the guy who builds a full ratings system for a living looks at a human ballot and says yeah, that's about right, that tells you something about where the sport's talent has settled.

Here is the piece of it that will outlive the news cycle. Ohio State and Oregon at 1-2 gives the Big Ten both top spots in the preseason AP poll for the first time in 65 years. Sixty-five years. That is a long time for a league to go without owning the front page in August, and it is a very short time for Oregon, who was a Pac-12 program not long ago, to be sitting at No. 2 in a Big Ten stack. Realignment did not just change travel schedules. It changed who the voters look at first.

checked the almanac: the ap poll has been arguing with itself since 1936, and it has never once settled anything before a snap was taken.

That is the honest caveat on all of it. A preseason poll is a collection of educated guesses made by people who have watched a lot of spring practice video and read a lot of roster attrition. It is a starting position, not a finish. The value is in what it reveals about consensus, and this year the consensus is unusually tight. Even the dissent was mild: one voice on the network flagged Texas as the team that stands out on the list, another spent a segment on where the ballot got it right and where it got it wrong, and none of it rose above a normal August grumble.

What comes next is the fun part, because polls that start boring rarely stay boring. Somebody in the top five loses in September to a team nobody circled, the ballot lurches, and the whole thing becomes a living document again. I'm watching how long Ohio State and Oregon hold 1 and 2 together, because 65 years is a long streak to break and a very easy one to break right back.