College football rankings: Ohio State would rank at no. 2 open as Big Ten, Pac-12 teams added to demand for preseason

Many college football fans have taken all of their favorite sports from them this fall. Conferences such as the Big Ten, Pac-12, Mountain West and MAC have been postponed until spring at the earliest, leaving a significant void in the lives of many fans across the country.

It also left a very low gap in our traditional CBS Sports 130 rankings for college football, which have been downgraded to the CBS Sports 76. Of course, although 41.5% of the teams we would normally rank are gone , we did not want to leave all those fans without the chance to see where their favorite teams would rank if their seasons were not canceled.

As you will see in the table below, things would have looked a lot different! While we have six SEC teams in the top 10 of CBS Sports 76, that number would fall to four in the 130. Also, while the ACC has eight teams (Notre Dame counts) in the top 25 of the CBS Sports 76, it would have only three in the 130.

Overall, three of our top 10 teams (No. 2 Ohio State, No. 7 Oregon and No. 9 Penn State) had canceled their seasons, as did 10 of our original top 25. No conference left a bigger hole in our top 25 than the Big Ten. The conference had six teams in the original top 25, while the Pac-12 and Mountain West combined for just four with Oregon being the only team to crack the top 15.

The absence of the Big Ten is felt further than just the top 25. Of the 14 teams in the conference, only two run out of the top 65 teams in the 130: No. 93 Maryland and No. 112 Rutgers. The team with the lowest rank outside of these two was Purdue at no. 62. In other words, the Big Ten made up 18.5% of the top half of our polls. Only the SEC matched that with 12 of its own.

Among the Big Ten teams that are missing, I can feel no less for one than Minnesota. The Golden Gophers, coming off a season with 11 wins, would begin 2020 ranking at no. 16. That’s the highest they would have ever started a season in our rankings, and they had not started a season starting rankings in the AP Top 25 since 2004. This was a season in which Minnesota would have fought for a division title. Instead, it will be a year of what could have been.

Then there is the USC, which would have been at number 20 despite all the questions surrounding coach Clay Helton. While my colleagues and I were hesitant to give the Trojans this early credit, I can tell you that more than a few of us thought this team had the potential to surprise and possibly prove a worthy enemy to Oregon in the Pac- 12.

Here’s what the CBS Sports 130 would look like if each FBS team played in the fall of 2020. Check out our official 2020 Preseason CBS Sports 76 rankings to see how teams benefited from cancellations among nearly half of FBS.

Of course, although most of the attention is on the table, we can not ignore the bottom line. As the driving force behind the Bottom 25 every season, seeing conferences like the MAC and independents like UMass, UConn and New Mexico State continue to be a serious blow.

UMass is the reigning Bottom 25 Champion and will not have a chance to defend his title! It’s lunacy!

While my question of the Bottom 25 is independent of the CBS Sports 130, our original ranking gives us an idea of ​​how the Bottom 25 will be affected. There are 14 of the 25 teams below our poll that will not play this fall. That is theoretically 56% of the field! Compare that to the top 25, where we only lost 10 teams.

If there’s a silver lining sitting on this cloud, it’s that having so many of the usual suspects out of the pool means we’ll see a wider range of Power Five teams cracking the Bottom 25. After all, with only 76 teams playing this fall, that means almost a third of them will be in the bottom 25 each week.

That will probably ruffle a few fires, and angry college football fans may be our only clutch with normalcy in the college football season 2020. We need to cherish it in every way we can to get it.