Preseason Rankings Roundup: Where Big 12 Teams Stand in 2025 Polls

The 2025 preseason college football rankings are here! In this episode of the First and 12 Podcast, we break down the latest Top 25 rankings from six major outlets — including ESPN, Fox Sports, CBS Sports, Athlon, The Athletic, and Sporting News. We dive into where Big 12 teams land in each poll, who’s rising, who’s underrated, and what it all means heading into the new season. Whether it’s Kansas State cracking the top 20, or questions around Colorado and Texas Tech, we’ve got you covered. Don’t miss this essential Big 12 football preview!

Keywords:
2025 college football rankings, preseason top 25, Big 12 football preview, ESPN Top 25, Athlon Sports rankings, CBS Sports college football, Fox Sports preseason poll, Kansas State football, Utah Big 12, Texas Tech football, college football playoff, Big 12 vs SEC, preseason college football analysis

Transcript

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The preseason rankings are out for most publications. Where do the big 12 teams rank? We're going to talk about that on today's show.[MUSIC PLAYING] From all of home in the state to Colorado, Arizona, state to Cincinnati, we've got big 12 covered from end zone to buzzer beaders. This is first in 12. Draw access pass to all 16 teams. All in, every episode.[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello and welcome to another episode of first in 12. I am your host, Adam Gibby. Thank you so much for joining us today. You could do me a huge favor, like this episode. Leave a five star review on the podcast, whether you're listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening. It helps the algorithm, helps more people to be able to find this show, and helps build this community of big 12 fans. Also, follow us on social media at-- also, follow us on social media on X at first in 12. That is the word first and XII Roman numerals, or as you see it in the big 12 logo. If you have suggestions, want to talk, leave a comment. Send me a message. I will bring it up on the show. This is your show. I want this to be about the big 12 community, and I would love to hear what you want to say. So the pre-season rankings have come out for most major publications. I'm talking ESPN, CBS Sports, Ath1, Sporting News, Fox, and Bleacher Report. And I am going to present them as they top 25 of their average ranking, meaning if Ohio State came in number one in one bracket, and number one in another, but then number three in the second, they may average at 1.7. But once you actually average all the teams, Ohio State still comes in as number one. I'm going to present these as if they're top 25. Some of these teams, such as Oklahoma, who will be number 25, actually averaged about a 27.6, but there was no team above them in the top 25, so they come in at 25 overall. So with that, here we go. We have Ohio State at number one, a Texas at number two, Penn State number three, Clemson comes in at number four, followed by Georgia at number five. Notre Dame is six, seven is Oregon, LSU follows at eight. Alabama will not be very happy about this. Comes in at number nine. Number 10 is Illinois. Then you get some big 12 teams at number 11, airs on a state, number 12, BYU. Miami is 13, Florida is 14. South Carolina comes in at 15. 16 is Michigan, 17 is Kansas State, followed by their rival Iowa State at 18. 19 is Ole Miss, 20 is SMU, 21 Indiana, 22 is Texas Tech, followed by Tennessee at 23. Texas A&M is at 24, and we finish with Oklahoma at 25. There's a couple of takeaways I wanna talk about here. The first being that there are only 10 teams from the SEC. You may be saying, what? What do you mean by only 10? That's a ton. It is a ton, but then you need to remember the ESPN FPI and I talked about this on a show last week. They had 14 teams in the top 25, including 12 in the top 18. Just something ridiculous and crazy. It seems like all these other publications are coming together though saying, hey, let's put some reality back into this. Yes ESPN, we know you love the SEC. Yes, we know you're the exclusive partner of the SEC, but there is still other college football teams. We have to rank them fairly. Also in the ESPN FPI, there were only two teams in the top 25 from the big 12. They are five in these average rankings between the six publications. This seems a lot more fair. This seems like something a lot more realistic to what we might actually see come the fall. Now this is again, not the official poll. These are just averages, and these are very well put together lists. These are not your common fan. These are not even the AP voters who let's be honest, sometimes don't always watch what's going around college football. They get to their preseason rankings. They find out who the biggest brands are. They might look at ESPN FPI or other rankings and make their decisions based off of that. So once we actually get to the college football season, I project that they are going to be teams that are ranked significantly higher than they are. Take Texas A&M as an example. I do not believe they're going to be ranked 24th. They're probably going to be ranked in the top 15 just because of brand as well as the ESPN FPI rankings, which a lot of AP voters are probably going to look at where Texas A&M I believe came in eighth overall in those rankings. Another takeaway from this is that there are no teams from the G5. There is no G5 team represented as a top 25 team. What this says to me is that all these major publications do not believe because this is their projections of who they think the top 25 teams are. They do not believe there's a single team in the G5 that is good enough to be ranked. Now there are some publications who have Boise State in the high 20s. And I do think that when the polls come out, Boise State will be ranked because they did make the college football playoff last year. There are enough voters that have garnered enough respect for Boise State that I would be shocked if they're not in the 20 to 25 range in the first poll of the season. What that says though is that NIL and the transfer portal have essentially destroyed the G5, at least in the minds of these educated voters. And it makes a lot of sense. If you're at Boise State or if you're at Utah State, Georgia Southern, Appalachian State, Coast Carolina, whatever, whatever G5 school you want. And you have a good season. You have the opportunity to go make three, four times the amount of money at AP for school. You have an opportunity to get the exposure of ESPN, Fox, TNT, CBS, whatever, whatever program you want. You're gonna take that. And there's no penalty for it now. And so, you know, a team like Boise State has a good year last year or a team like Toledo has a good year a couple of years ago. And what do all their good players do? They all transfer. They all leave the program and they all go say,"Hey, we're going to go make more money. We're going to go play for a bigger team. We're going to get more exposure." And really set ourselves up for a better future, both financially but then also in terms of making it to the NFL. So that was an interesting takeaway for me is that between the six Boise State to not make it, there was no other G5 team that even got close. So what do I think is gonna happen in the fall? I think you're gonna see big 12 teams ranked lower than where they are right now. Again, Arizona State at 11 BYU at 12, 17 and 18 were Kansas State and Iowa State and Texas Tech came in at 22. I think that the AP voters, again, a lot of them aren't following college sports, they're not really following what's going on in the day to day. They're just going to look at the ESPN, FPI rankings, which again have, including Auburn who went to and six in the SEC last year, all ranked in the top 15. I think a lot of voters are gonna look at that. They're also gonna look at brands. They're going to consider teams like Auburn or consider teams like Texas A&M, Tennessee, Oklahoma and say, "Well, we have to rank them in the top 15 because that's what we do every year and it's just sort of the status quo." I'm not saying every single voter does that. There are plenty of voters who do their due diligence. They look at actual rankings. They look at rosters, expectations, and then they make educated projections. And that's what rankings are supposed to be as a projection. If the college football playoff started today, these are the 16 teams who would be the most, sorry, 12 teams who would be the most qualified to make the playoff. But again, I don't think that's going to actually end up happening. I could also see a team like Colorado getting in over a team like Texas Tech. If you're educated, you know, you've been following Texas Tech that you know that they have a fantastic quarterback. They've brought in an amazing transfer portal class. They have the NIL, they have the backing, backing, they have the support of Texas Tech and their administrators. They're going to be set up to have a great season whereas Colorado just lost, should or standards. They lost Travis Hunter. They lost a bunch of big key pieces to their success last year. But when you look at the AP voters, you look at who they're going to be following. Deon Sanders is still a major brand. He's still a major story in college football. And there is a very real world where Colorado comes in ranked despite maybe not having the same talent or the same actual projections that the team like Texas Tech has in the same sort of thought process. Arizona State and BYU are likely to come in lower than 11 and 12. I just see Florida Michigan Ole Miss getting the benefit of the doubt and being put ranked ahead them because they're bigger brands. Again, these are AP voters are likely to do. Now, I do like these rankings though. I love these rankings. I think that these six composite rankings averaged is about where we should start off the season. Personally, this feels like a fair spot for teams to start off. This feels like a fair spot for these teams to be able to climb up into the rankings, get into the playoff conversation and prove it on the field. That has been the biggest emphasis of the college football off season and conversations I've seen both on this show and other shows is earn it on the field. We're not going to reward quality losses. We are not going to reward recruiting rankings. We're not going to reward biggest NIL or transfer portal classes. What we're going to reward is winning on the field and that's what's most important by having Arizona State at 11, by having Texas Tech at 22. IOS State at 18, Kansas State at 17 and BYU at 12. All five of these teams have a very real good opportunity to climb into the top 15 by the time that the preseason or non-conference slate ends and then you can go prove it in big 12 play and try to get multiple teams into the college football playoff. Now, you may be saying, well, what about TCU? What about Baylor? What about Colorado? These teams who aren't ranked? They will have their opportunities. There is something to be said about finishing off the season ranked the year before and I think that should carry more value than it does. Like I said, I think Boise State, despite losing a ton of talent, should start off ranked in the top 20. I would have them in the top 15 even. They went to the college football playoff last year. They had a phenomenal season. Yes, they had action, Gen. T. Yes, they had other great players that have gone on and left. But the coaching and the style, it's still there. And the Broncos shouldn't just be thrown out of the top 25 because we feel like it. If you do well in a season, you should be rewarded the next season by getting some kind of advantage. If I had the perfect rankings, I would leave the rankings as how they finished the year before. Meaning if you finished ranked number 11th, you start off the season ranked number 11th. Even if you lost everybody, you have a brand new coach, everything's brand new. You should keep your ranking until you are forced to lose it, until you prove that you don't deserve that ranking anymore. I think that that would be fair. Given that we're going to have pre-season rankings in a perfect world, we don't have pre-season rankings. We wait until week four or five when we've actually kind of seen, okay, things are playing out. That way we're not judging wins off of some pre-perceived notion that Florida State is going to be this phenomenal team. Georgia Tech never deserved to be ranked last year, yet they were because they beat the number 7 or 8 Florida State seminals in Ireland in the first week of the season. There was this perception they had done something amazing. What they actually did is they almost gave Florida State their only ACC win of the entire season. That's not me saying that Georgia Tech was a bad team, but they definitely got a lot more respect. They definitely got a lot more credibility from a win that wasn't actually as impressive as what it ended up being. So in a way, we get the AP poll. Typically, the AP poll is going to come out a week or two before the first games of the season. Again, I'm expecting the big 12 teams to probably come in a little bit lower than where they are. I'm expecting there'd be four teams ranked on the top of 25. I think those teams are going to be Arizona State, BYU, Kansas State and Iowa State. I think there's an outside shot. We could see Colorado sort of sneak in at 24/25. If people and the voters actually do their homework, Texas Tech should be right there as well. I also think Baylor should be a team that should be receiving some votes. But we'll find out. We'll see what ends up happening with that. Just one other thing I want to talk about before we close up this episode. I wanted to mention something that I brought up on yesterday's episode with the Jake Ritz left situation. One thing that I feel like I didn't do a good enough job on is clarifying that I do care about the legal side of what's going on. I do care about the victims. I do care about these people. What I was just trying to emphasize is that this is a sport show. This is a big 12 show. And that is what my focus is. There are going to be plenty of other podcasts. There's going to be plenty of other coverage on the legal side of things. I'm not uncaring of the situation. I care about the alleged victim. I care about Jake Ritz left. I care about what happens in the lives of all of them. But my job on this podcast is to cover the big 12 and the teams in the big 12. That is my job. And that is what I'm going to do. And so going forward, I want that to just sort of be an understanding that yes, I do understand what's going on. Yes, I do care about the consequences. Yes, I do care about people who have things happen to them. And there's a time and a place for that. And this podcast is just not that time or place. So I just wanted to clarify that really quickly. Also wanted just to mention that the Know the Folk series is getting delayed just a little bit. I've been working on some. I've been troubleshooting some things with my recording studio. Trying to get a phone call to actually work. I'm working those bugs out. But once that gets worked out, we will start off the Know the Folk series. We are taking interest right now. I have a couple of teams that have already been covered. BYU fans already reached out. Iowa State fans already reached out. If you are interested in our fan of another team and would want to be on this Know the Folk series, please let me know again. If you know your team better than anybody else, you know the Dept Chart, you know the quarterback, you know the weaknesses, the strengths, projections, maybe storylines that nobody's talking about. I want to talk to you. I want to interview you and get your take on that. I want to learn about your team to the point where when an opponent is coming to town, they can listen to the podcast and learn all about that team, as well as get your own fan-based excited. So if that's you, you want to have that conversation. Please shout out to me on x. Again, that was that first one, 12. And I will catch you next time. Have a great day. Bye.(upbeat music)(upbeat music)(upbeat music)(upbeat music)