College Football Rankings 2020: Projected preseason Top 25 sans Pac-12, Big Ten

25. Mississippi State Bulldogs

• Where they were ranked in the 2019 preseason: 28th (87 points)
• Where they were ranked at the end of 2019: unranked (0 points)
• Where they were in our way-too-early Top 25: unranked
• Where they ranked in the preseason Coaches Poll: 39th (9 points)

If any league is poised to benefit more than any other from the absence of the Big Ten and Pac-12 from the national discussion, it is the SEC. Regularly considered the top league in the country, SEC schools could dominate the preseason AP Top 25. Even given the fact that they released their preseason rankings prior to the postponements by two of the Power Five leagues, the Coaches Poll had three SEC schools in the top five, four in the top 10, and six total in the Top 25.

Three others received a scattering of votes. All three of those teams will likely vault up into the AP Top 25 this preseason since the media now knows the state of the field. After all, 18 of the 51 teams that coaches gave at least one vote will no longer be playing football this fall.

If we just took the Coaches Poll and excised all the teams that won’t be playing football from the list, this is what it looks like:

As you can see, Mississippi State falls right behind Virginia at No. 26 by this estimation. There is always some shakeup between the AP voters and the coaches, though, so we can expect every SEC team featured on this Coaches Poll to make the AP Top 25. Bias against Group of Five programs will likely continue, leaving Navy to drop out and Mississippi State to slot in.

That isn’t a slight against the Bulldogs, who return workhorse Kylin Hill to a team breaking in new head coach Mike Leach. They do, however, lose more than half of their defensive production and a lot of talent on offense. The hope is that Stanford transfer KJ Costello can step in and make a big difference in the Air Raid right away.