The post-spring top 25 has established the college football rankings for the 2024 season, with Oregon, Georgia, and Ohio State emerging as the front-runners.
College football rankings are primarily dominated by power conference teams, with a limited number of Group of Five schools included because of continuous realignment patterns.
The collegiate football environment has undergone a dramatic change in recent years as a result of prominent Group of Five teams like Cincinnati, Houston, UCF, and SMU moving to the Power Four leagues.
With the collapse of the Pac-12, 24 of the 25 teams in the CBS Sports post-spring top 25 rankings are from the dominant Power Four conferences. The rankings show that college football’s elite divisions are becoming more consolidated, with independent Notre Dame being the only outlier.
The Big Ten and SEC have the majority of the top 10 teams in the rankings, which is indicative of both conferences’ supremacy in the post-realignment era.
The top-ranked winners from conferences like the MAC, Mountain West, Conference USA, AAC, and Sun Belt will have a chance to play in the enlarged 12-team College Football Playoff system, even if Group of Five teams may not have clinched slots in the top 25 rankings.
Though there wasn’t much of a stir during the transfer portal session, Georgia is still the preseason favorite, closely followed by Ohio State, which has gained a lot of momentum during the offseason. Oregon is a noteworthy addition to the top three rankings, indicating that it is becoming a serious contender.
Miami and Clemson are two teams that have witnessed significant increases in the rankings, and Texas A&M, which had not been ranked before, has now earned a slot.
The top-ranked teams reinforce their areas of strength and secure their standing as perennial contenders in the highly competitive world of college football as the scene changes around them.