The first AP poll of the 2015 college football season is set to be released at 2 p.m. EST today. What should the fans be expecting when the preseason poll is actually released?
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Some of the things that will be in the poll are already very obvious. The defending national champions — the Ohio State Buckeyes — will be the No. 1 team in the poll and it is very possible that they will be a unanimous selection. The Buckeyes return many key players from their title team and are already the runaway favorites to win the title again this season.
The next reasonable assumption we can make is that the TCU Horned Frogs will be No. 2. TCU finished at No. 3 in the final AP rankings after last season, and with No. 2 Oregon losing quarterback Marcus Mariota to the NFL, it is safe to assume that the Horned Frogs will jump up and capture the No. 2 spot in the preseason rankings.
After those two, however, is where things get tricky. The Pac-12 and SEC are still complete question marks with regards to finding a front-runner, and the projected ACC champs — whether it be Florida State or Clemson — have been generally set outside of the top four.
At least three voters have already made their ballots public: ESPN's Brett McMurphy, San Jose Mercury's Jon Wilner, and Statesman Journal's Gary Horowitz. It is only three out of 59, but we can see some patterns that form from these three. The first being that all three are extremely high on Michigan State, as all three put the Spartans in their top fives; Wilner even went as far as putting the Spartans at No. 4 and saying they could make the College Football Playoff.
The other pattern that formed was complete confusion over the SEC, with Horowitz being the only one to include an SEC team (Alabama) in his top four. Why is this important? It seems to indicate that because no one is sold on a single, dominant SEC winner. Because of this, the rankings will reflect SEC teams being ranked lower than they are used to in these rankings.
Remember Week 9 of last season where the SEC had four to the top five teams in the AP poll? Expect the opposite here; the SEC may be lucky to get one in the top five of the AP preseason rankings. But of course, this is preseason; the only rankings that really matter are the ones that come out at the end of the year.
