The 2025 preseason AP poll now looks almost surreal. Texas opened at No. 1, Penn State at No. 2 and Alabama at No. 8, while Indiana was ranked No. 20. By the end of the season, Texas and Penn State were nowhere near the College Football Playoff picture, Alabama was the only one of the three to make the field, and was promptly blown out by Indiana 38-3 in the Rose Bowl. Indiana, meanwhile, went from a team the voters viewed as a fringe Top-20 program to an undefeated national champion.
So why was the preseason poll so far off? The biggest problem was that AP voters were still heavily weighting brand, history, returning talent and the previous season's results rather than trying to identify which teams had actually improved the most. Texas had just reached the CFP semifinal, Penn State had been a playoff team, and Alabama was Alabama. Indiana, despite going 11-2 in 2024, was treated as a Cinderella story rather than a program that might actually be building something sustainable. That bias became particularly costly in an era of NIL and the transfer portal, where rosters can change dramatically from one season to the next. The Washington Post noted that preseason Top-15 teams had one of their worst combined performances in decades, while teams such as Indiana, Texas Tech, Ole Miss and Texas A&M dramatically exceeded expectations.
Perhaps the larger lesson is that preseason polls are not really predictions, they are reputational rankings. Voters know what Texas, Penn State and Alabama are supposed to be, but they have very little evidence about what any team will actually be in September. Indiana was the perfect counterexample: the voters saw last year's record and ranked the Hoosiers No. 20; they didn't see the team that would eventually go 16-0 and win the national championship.