Nebraska is this year’s Indiana*
*According to the early national title odds at least, which aren’t without weakness but are probably better than most of the “way too early” top 25s
One national-title game ends, odds for the next one come out. That’s just how it works now even though we have little idea what any team’s actual roster will look like come kickoff of the 2025 season. Doesn’t matter. The beast must be fed and the beastkeepers know that canned food donations (i.e., traffic) will roll in, very relatively speaking, if you have a top-25 ready to go before the top-25 of the current season is even finalized.
Welcome to “way too early” season, which is becoming one of my favorite times of the year as college football becomes a fraction less predictable. Something I actively seek out at the same time each year while knowing I’ll just be mad (mostly) when I get there, qualifies as a “favorite” for me. Like most everyone else on the internet, I just want to feel something.
Way-too-early top 25s give me that because most of the time they’re just a summation of which teams have the best supporting evidence for inclusion in a top 25. They’re not predictive. More often they’re a compilation of “which team raises the least ire?” and that’s enough to keep the conversation going when there’s no football. Most of the time, that’s the usual suspects using traditional markers of success. That worked well enough for most of college football’s history—and still works at the very top, I think—but how well does it actually work now?
Thirteen of the 25 teams in this year’s final AP poll weren’t ranked by the same voters in the preseason. Those voters have the benefit of assessing all the roster and coaching changes, as well as a decent sample size, before putting out a poll right before the season. This past season, more than half of that preseason group wouldn’t be ranked at year’s end.
What hope is there for rankings of the “way too early” variety? Probably not much. The formula for these remains stubbornly the same while college football changes drastically. But they do offer the earliest look at the offseason consensus that will largely calcify over the next seven months. So, if the broad strokes of public perception are already being put to paper, what’s it already saying about the Big Ten in 2025 and, specifically, Nebraska?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Counter Read to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.