March 27, 2026
By Bill Connelly, ESPN: We’ve talked about who is and isn’t returning. We’ve talked about who might have gotten a few too many (or not enough) bounces last season. We’ve talked about the effect coaching changes might have. Now there’s only one thing left to do: Rank college football teams for 2026!
Below are this season’s initial SP+ projections. In addition to the rankings of every FBS team (overall, offense, defense and special teams), we’ll look at conference breakdowns and how SP+ matches up with the eyeball test in terms of which teams seem to be overrated and which could be underrated at this early stage. Indiana predictably finished last season No. 1, and the Hoosiers remain a top-five presence, but two other well-stocked, well-funded Big Ten foes lead the way to start 2026.
As a reminder, SP+ is a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a résumé ranking. Along those same lines, these projections aren’t intended to be a guess at what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the season. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information we have been able to gather.
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