Who strengthened their case in the Top 25 and who will slide this week? Here are our projections for the first week of the college football season.
It is always dangerous to read too much into one week of college football. Teams that are highly touted in the AP Top 25 in the preseason can still be sorting things out on the gridiron, while others that might have been overlooked by pollsters can make a strong case to move up into the ranks of the ranked.
While it can be dangerous to give too much credence to a single result, though, it is also the nature of the poll game. Now that we actually have our first data points in, everyone is inclined to start parsing out what each Top 25 team did in their first action and assessing their relative strengths and weaknesses.
We often see a team make a big launch up the polls after the opening weekend, at at least one team plummet down the rankings. This week, however, there was only one Top 25 team that lost — and that defeat occurred in the only contest pitting ranked teams against one another. There will be some movement, but it won’t be too dramatic in this opening week.
After needing triple overtime to defeat an in-state FCS opponent, Iowa State is likely to plunge into the land of others receiving votes. Who might step in and take the Cyclones’ spot this week? Keep reading for our first set of AP Top 25 projections of the 150th season of college football.