Final AP Poll Top 25 Is Once Again A Complete Joke
Crimson Tide moved up two spots to 9th despite four regular season losses and awful Rose Bowl loss.
This is getting ridiculous.
The Associated Press Top 25 Poll started the 2025 college football season as it so often does, by creating wildly inaccurate expectations for several teams. The LSU Tigers, for example, started in the top-10. By the end of the season, they'd fired their head coach, lost their bowl game to the Houston Cougars, finished 3-5 in the SEC and 7-6 overall. Clemson was ranked in the top 5. They, too, finished 7-6 overall, though at least held on to Dabo Swinney and finished 4-4 in their conference.
Penn State was number two in the first poll of the season. They also fired their head coach and were a huge disappointment. Arizona State was number 11, South Carolina number 13, Kansas State number 17, and the National Champion Indiana Hoosiers were just 20th.
Predicting college football is hard, obviously, and it's understandable for there to be mistakes when it comes to guessing the best teams. Which is why preseason polls probably shouldn't exist in the first place. But now that we've had an entire season, a bowl season, and finished out the College Football Playoff, there's no excuse for poor rankings. Yet that's exactly what the final poll of the season delivered on Tuesday.
Alabama Crimson Tide quarterback Ty Simpson. (Mandatory Credit: Nelson Chenault-Imagn Images)
Poll Voters Just Can't Quit Alabama
The top seven or eight teams in the final poll are relatively straightforward.
- Indiana
- Miami
- Ole Miss
- Oregon
- Ohio State
- Georgia
- Texas Tech
- Texas A&M
You can quibble over the exact order, but that's a relatively solid list. This, though, is where things go off the rails.
At number nine in the country is…the Alabama Crimson Tide. The same Alabama team that was obliterated by Indiana in the quarterfinal game at the Rose Bowl. The same Alabama team that lost four games this past season. Four games! Ranked in the top 10! As the CFB Kings X account noted, this is virtually unprecedented.
Not only that, but AP Poll voters actually moved the Tide up two spots after their playoff performance. How on earth?
Just behind them are Notre Dame and BYU, and the Irish sitting home didn't help, but BYU won their bowl game and their only two losses of the season were to Texas Tech. What exactly did we see from Alabama to justify being ranked ahead of them? Vanderbilt sits 15th, two spots ahead of the Iowa Hawkeyes team they lost to in a bowl game. What?
Head-to-head matters, until it doesn't.
This is the problem with the AP Poll; many voters either don't watch all the games, or have poor evaluation skills. Which wouldn't matter much anymore, in the playoff era, except for the fact that their preseason expectations wind up impacting the rankings for the rest of the season. They keep trying to tell us that nobody should take them seriously, and for some reason, people aren't listening.