AP and Coaches Poll rankings for the 2026 season

What each poll actually is

The Associated Press Top 25 is a ballot of sportswriters and broadcasters. Each voter submits an ordered list of twenty-five teams; the published ranking is the aggregate. It has no official standing in the competition and no bearing on who plays for anything. It is the oldest and most widely quoted of the three, which is why it is often mistaken for a standing.

The US LBM Coaches Poll is a ballot of participating head coaches from the Football Bowl Subdivision, administered through the American Football Coaches Association. It measures a different electorate with different information: coaches watch preparation and personnel, writers watch games and narratives.

The College Football Playoff Selection Committee ranking is not a poll. It is produced by a named committee that meets, deliberates and votes to a published set of instructions, and it is the ranking that determines the postseason field. Its first release of the 2026 season is dated November 3. Before that date there is no committee ranking of any kind, and any September claim about a team's "playoff position" is an inference from a media vote rather than a position in anything.

Why the two polls disagree

They disagree because they are separate ballots cast by separate people, not because one of them is wrong. A team can sit two or three places apart in the same week without either electorate having made a mistake: the voters weigh the same results differently, and a poll is an average of opinions rather than a measurement.

This desk reproduces both as published and does not average, reconcile or correct them. Where they differ, the difference is itself the information — it usually marks a team whose record is genuinely ambiguous.

How to read movement in September

Early-season poll movement is larger and means less than it looks. A preseason ballot is cast before anybody has played, so it measures reputation and returning personnel; every week after that, voters are correcting an opinion formed on no evidence. A team can fall fourteen places after one defeat, as Texas A&M did following week three, without having become fourteen places worse.

The useful reading is the opposite of the dramatic one. A large fall usually says the preseason estimate was high, not that the team collapsed; a large rise often says a team was underrated in August. Neither is yet a statement about how the season will end, because in September most teams have played nobody who could beat them.