SportsRatings

Some weird moments in college football in Week One of 2026 but not many upsets, and in the end no change in the teams featured in our 12-team playoff prediction. Notre Dame remains on top after beating Wisconsin handily (following a slow start). The Irish are now at around 50/50 odds to finish in the top four! This is due to other top teams falling off a bit, where no slacking is tolerated. Indiana allowed 16 points vs. North Texas and lost almost 5 Playoff points and almost 5% of their national champ odds, too; Oregon , of course, had trouble with Boise State and fell 4.3%; Ohio State mauled Ball State 56-3 but the Big Ten is getting devalued a bit in general. Only Penn State rose a meager +0.3% after exactly matching our projected 45 point margin vs. Marshall. The Lions are proving our very rosy forecast correct so far, but it's only one game in. Outside the Big Ten finally, Miami had a solid game at Stanford, winning 45-6, while Texas Tech was less than impressive in beati...

What do you think? Is UMass good or is Rutgers bad? (Why not both?) The college football world is assuming that UMass is still one of the worst teams and Rutgers, playing at home and losing 37-21, is officially very, very bad. That's not an unfair analysis. UMass was 0-12 last year and there wasn't much reason to figure they would be much better. In fact they were #138 out of 138 in my Pre-season Top 138, with some chance to maybe be like #136.  We showed a 6.6% chance for UMass to beat Rutgers. Expected margin? Rutgers by 43!! Vegas showed a roughly 30 point spread. The Scarlet Knights were supposed to get better this year, at least according to SportsRatings. We had the Knights going from #65 in Strength to rank #48 pre-season.  After this loss, it's going to be hard for Rutgers to make a bowl game, that's for sure. They only had 49% bowl odds to begin the season. And they are going to be pretty severely devalued, even just from one game. Even if that game was a total...

Week "zero" is in the past, what did we learn? Not much, since very few teams played. Still, we saw some minor changes in our projected Final Top 25. Not much at the top, with Notre Dame still at #1 with some minor adjustments to their odds, mostly random. The rest of the top ten saw some interesting minor moves: Indiana's Playoff Odds dropped a bit, as did Oregon's and Ohio State's . All three teams play USC, who beat San Jose State 42-26, a less-than-stellar result. And that decreased the value of a win over the Trojans, hence the drops of 1.5%, 1.5%, and 2.7%. But wait, Penn State's odds jumped 2.2% and they play USC too? Let's just call that a fluke buried in the simulation. Miami jumped from #10 to #7 while Texas A&M fell from #7 to #10. Again, this is probably a random move between teams that were packed tightly around that region. Their odds barely changed. And the same 12 teams are pegged to make the Playoff. That includes North Dakota St...

Here is our pre-season projected Final Top 25 Committee Rankings and analysis. We rank every team here based on what type of season they can expect to have; this is different from a pure quality rating in our Pre-season Top 138 , which doesn't worry about the schedule they will face. This ranking does. I'm going to update the pre-season numbers at the static page until the FBS kickoff on August 29 (trying to account for the 5-year eligibility court rulings if possible), and update week by week during the season of course. Notre Dame was our #2 ranked team in the pre-season top 138 but they end up #1 in the Projected Final Committee Rankings. #1 Indiana has to settle for 2nd place. Why? Schedule. Indiana plays a tough Big Ten schedule. But Notre Dame has the #69 SOS in the country, with two decent-sized hurdles in Miami and BYU (finishing #10 and #17 on this projection). The Irish have a 1 in 3 chance to go undefeated and don't have a pesky conference championship game to...

Without further ado, the SportsRatings 2026 pre-season rankings, #1 to #138 Key: 2025 record , Strength ranking for 2025, with '25 Offense and Defense ranking This is the starting basis for ranking Returning talent rank (scaled 1-138); Portal "class" ranking; " Pure " 2026 ranking; Program rank The 2026 team consists of returning players and those acquired through the Portal; this forms the bulk of a team's rating, the Pure 2026 rating. This is modified by the Program rank, which tracks the current baseline rating of the program, and accounts for recruiting 2026 projected record game-by-game (and cumulative); Bowl  eligibility odds; Rank within conference Brief rundown of team's personnel losses and portal gains  Team schedule with % chance to win for each game Schedule rundown (note: Pac-12 games with a * are tentatively scheduled and actual matchups will be determined later in the year) Updates : These notes refer to a situation not accounted fo...