The Corner Poll is back, and college football has finally joined the party.
The whole idea here is pretty simple. I’m ranking teams based on how I feel about them right now. Winning matters, obviously, but so do expectations, talent and whatever general vibes I’m getting from a team at any given moment. This isn’t supposed to tell you who would beat whom on a neutral field, and it definitely isn’t a prediction of how the final standings will look. Sometimes a team is just going to be higher because I like what’s going on. That’s the Corner Poll in a nutshell.
College football makes this especially fun because nobody has played a game yet. Everything is based on what we’ve spent the entire offseason watching, reading and convincing ourselves to believe. In a week, a good chunk of it could look incredibly stupid. I can’t wait.
The Premier League has actually played, though, and one matchweek is clearly enough evidence to overreact to everything. Arsenal is the greatest team ever assembled. Manchester United is finished. Hull City is a juggernaut. You get the idea.
Let’s rank some teams.
College Football Preseason
National Championship or Bust
Notre Dame
Indiana
Ohio State
Texas
Oregon
Georgia
Miami
There is a pretty clear delineation at the top of college football entering the season, with these seven schools separating themselves from everyone else. Feel free to reorder those seven however you want because I could probably be convinced of almost any configuration depending on the day. That’s how close this group feels, and one look at the rosters tells you why — they’re just so similar! There aren’t a lot of glaring holes, and even the questions that do exist feel fixable to some degree.
Could somebody outside of this group end up lifting the trophy in late January? Of course. This is sports, after all, and sports can get wacky and weird. But these are, at least in my brain, the seven most complete teams in college football, and that counts for something, especially before the first snap of the season. If you’re asking me to find the national champion, I’m starting here.
Playoff? Yeah, Why the Heck Not
LSU
Texas Tech
Alabama
Ole Miss
BYU
Oklahoma
USC
Texas A&M
Michigan
The expanded College Football Playoff era has brought plenty of things I don’t particularly love, but one of the positives is that the postseason race feels considerably more open than it did when only four teams were allowed into the party. There are 16 teams on this list alone that I can reasonably envision making the CFP, and that doesn’t even include the inevitable school currently sitting outside the main picture that will emerge from nowhere and make all of us look incompetent.
