How the AP preseason football poll predicts the final College Football Playoff rankings

In the 2023 college football season, two-time defending champion Georgia was the AP Poll’s preseason No. 1 team for the first time in the College Football Playoff era, though the Bulldogs ended up missing out on the playoffs by coming in sixth in the final rankings. That meant the preseason No. 1 missed the four-team CFP for the second year in a row (Alabama in 2022).

“But how much do preseason polls actually matter?” you might ask. We analyzed the data and it turns out fans of the AP preseason No. 1 team should still be pretty excited despite consecutive semifinal misses — especially as the CFP bracket expands to 12 teams.

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From the 2014 season through 2023, the No. 1 team in the AP preseason poll made the playoff seven times — 2015 preseason No. 1 Ohio State was the only team from that group to not make the playoff before 2022 Alabama and 2023 Georgia. And even those three teams still finished ranked in the top seven — an impressive number that would mean good things as the CFP field expands to 12 teams starting with the 2024 season.

Here’s how the preseason AP poll correlates to the final College Football Playoff poll in the CFP era.

The categories below indicate for each preseason ranking in the AP poll, the teams’ average ranking in the final CFP poll, the best finish, the worst finish, the number of times a team has been not ranked in the final CFP poll and the number of times a team with that AP preseason ranking made the College Football Playoff.