College Football Fans Call For Removal of Preseason Top 25 Polls

Should preseason Top 25 polls exist? The 2026 college football season is set to get going later this month. With the start of the college football season comes preseason Top 25 polls. The preseason Coaches' Poll top 25 was released earlier this month, with Ohio State coming in at No. 1 overall. But ...

by Andrew Holleran

Aug 11, 2026

Preseason Top 25.

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Should preseason Top 25 polls exist?

The 2026 college football season is set to get going later this month. With the start of the college football season comes preseason Top 25 polls. The preseason Coaches' Poll top 25 was released earlier this month, with Ohio State coming in at No. 1 overall.

But some fans and media members are calling for the removal of the preseason Top 25 polls. Fans are getting tired of seeing the same names up top, accusing voters of bias, whether they realize they're doing it or not.

Dec 31, 2025; Arlington, TX, USA; Ohio State Buckeyes quarterback Julian Sayin (10) looks to throw in the first quarter against the Miami Hurricanes during the 2025 Cotton Bowl and quarterfinal game of the College Football Playoff at AT&T Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Raymond Carlin III-Imagn Images

ESPN's Scott Van Pelt is among those pushing for change.

“The point is that you’re selling stories and people and programs right now, in August, without any real knowledge for sure about what’s what,” he said this week on his podcast, SVPod.

SVP makes it clear that everyone is just guessing.

“Look at last year as an example of where teams began the season, and rankings, and it will happen again,” Van Pelt said. “Because there will be teams that you just presume are going to be good based on the pedigree of their past, some of the people that you know, looking at the portal acquisitions and thinking, ‘That should work.’ But you don’t know.”

College football fans agree - somewhat, anyway

"We are all just really guessing this time of year," one fan added.

"Currently there are only 16 SEC teams, if it were up to ESPN there would only be a preseason 16," another fan added.

"Nation’s second-most popular sport no longer needs these, and they can set damaging narratives, while often looking really stupid by October," Adam Rittenberg added.

"The majority of CFB history featured people voting on teams they could literally never see. I’m always pro-preseason rankings. Just dismiss your priors as quickly as possible," another fan wrote.

"I have bad news for folks who want to rid the world of evil preseason polls. Someone else is going to do them. In fact, they usually come out in magazine form summer. These are probably the same folks who thought divisions were the "devil" and we've seen how that worked out..." one fan added.

What do you think - should the polls exist?