There’s a game I like to play at the start of every college football season. Over the course of the sport’s opening weekend, I like to guess which Week 1 result we’ll all overreact to — in the wrong way.
It’s so hard to tell right out of the gate which teams are actually good or actually bad. It’s hard to tell if Team A is better than Team B because one is great, one is atrocious, or neither is very good and it’s essentially a mid-off. Typically, it takes a few weeks for us to get a better sense of teams’ identities, which allows us to revisit early-season results and put them into proper context.
As we sit here four weeks into the 2025 season, we’ve certainly seen enough to do just that. The Week 1 game we collectively overreacted to is obvious. It’s LSU-Clemson. LSU beat Clemson on the road in a game that was fairly evenly matched into the third quarter and dominated by defense overall. We came away from that game thinking that LSU finally had a championship-caliber defense — Clemson rushed for just 31 yards! — and we weren’t too worried about LSU’s pedestrian rushing attack because we figured Clemson’s defensive front, with all those future NFL players, would also be one of the best in the nation.
Now that Clemson is 1-3 for the first time in Dabo Swinney‘s tenure and we know that the Tigers have only been able to run the ball reliably once (vs. Syracuse, in a game that featured nearly 1,000 combined yards of offense) ... well, it’s easy to see that we overreacted to what LSU did (or didn’t do) in that game. The reason LSU is ranked as high as it is now is because it shot up from No. 9 in the preseason to No. 3 after Week 1 on the strength of that win over Clemson. It’s the same Clemson defense that got gashed by the Orange on Saturday to the tune of 435 yards of offense, with more than 300 yards accounted for in the first half alone.
If Clemson isn’t actually very good, then that’s hardly an impressive victory for LSU. I think my fellow voters are realizing that we should recalibrate accordingly — while remaining concerned about the state of the LSU offense, which ranks in the bottom third of the SEC in total offense and sits second-to-last in rushing offense.
LSU wasn’t the only SEC team to see its spot in the poll adjusted.
Texas has also been trending down since Week 1, as we realized that Arch Manning struggles against defenses far less talented than Ohio State’s. Even after the Longhorns finally had a get-right game vs. Sam Houston, it’s fair to slide Texas down a peg based on those concerns and the possibility that Manning’s play is a limiting factor for a team with national championship aspirations.
Unsurprisingly, Oklahoma scooted up a few spots after its win over Auburn. I kept the Sooners essentially where I had them a week ago because the jury’s still out on Auburn’s ceiling (and because the SEC said that Oklahoma should have had that controversial touchdown taken off the board due to the “hideout” substitution tactic). But I understand why my voters are high on the Sooners overall; they certainly look like they might have the SEC’s best defense, and John Mateer is incredibly fun and fearless at quarterback.
Texas A&M, Ole Miss and Tennessee have stayed relatively steady as of late. Alabama appears to have righted its ship since its season-opening loss to FSU but fell two spots this week while idle to make room for Indiana and Texas Tech off their big wins, which is totally fine. And the SEC teams that started the season unranked are starting to get their due as well. Vanderbilt and Missouri both have quietly climbed in the poll, which shows that my fellow voters and I are paying attention to them — and that we respect what we see. There’s still plenty of room for both to move up as they take on some of the more challenging opponents on their schedule in the coming weeks.
A couple of stray thoughts/observations:
- There’s a lot less hand-wringing this week about Notre Dame being ranked. Now that the Irish have a win over Purdue to go with their two losses to top-10 teams, they actually slid up two spots to No. 22.
- Miami jumped up to No. 2, which is where I’ve had them for a few weeks. The Hurricanes have impressive wins and very good offensive/defensive lines. Combining Miami’s performances and the Clemson drop-off (and its impact on our perception of LSU), and it makes total sense to put the ‘Canes at No. 2.
- My fellow voters did what I did with Texas Tech — we put the Red Raiders ahead of Iowa State as the top-ranked Big 12 team in the poll after their win at Utah.
- No. 21 USC is a team to watch. Maybe not at 2am ET, but in general.
