Ranking all 136 FBS teams in tiers

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the debate between the Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big 12 over the future of the College Football Playoff, it’s that committees are awful. They get it wrong nearly every year despite the fact that they’ve mostly gotten it right.

Of course, Top 25 lists are no better. You know who votes in those? Reporters and coaches. Reporters clearly don’t know ball, and coaches don’t have the time to watch the games. We can’t trust them either.

There was a time when we entrusted computers with assembling a proper ranking of teams. The BCS crunched the numbers based on some nebulous inputs and spat out the results. And while it might feel like ChatGPT could step in now and become a neutral arbiter, it would also be one more step toward our eventual demise as a species. If humans can’t rank college football teams, it’s just a matter of time before we’re all controlled by a sentient version of those coffee delivery drones.

No, there is really just one honest way to evaluate college football’s 136 FBS teams, and that is to sort through all the data, talk to a host of coaches and players and analysts, and then unilaterally put them into tiers.

And with that, we give you the most official, guaranteed-to-be-accurate, tiered preseason ranking for the 2025 season.

Jump to a section:
Cream of the crop | Teams that are hot | Big Ten’s ticking clocks
Room for improvement | Could be talked into them

Tier 1a: A great matchup for Week 1 and/or the championship game (two teams)

Ohio State
Texas

Last season, Ohio State won a national championship and, according to virtually every coach we’ve asked, the Buckeyes were the most talented team in the country all along. Only, if the playoff had waited one more year to expand, Ohio State would’ve missed out, and Ryan Day might’ve been looking for a job.

There’s a fun thought experiment to be done with those facts in mind: Did expanding the playoff give more teams an opportunity to win it all, or did it simply ensure that the best teams wouldn’t miss their chance due to something fluky (or, in Ohio State’s case, something that has become increasingly common)?

We pose this question because it may apply to the Buckeyes again in 2025. With a bevy of veterans off to the NFL from the 2024 national championship team and a fresh-faced quarterback taking over the offense, it’s entirely reasonable to think…