After Week 6 of the 2026 football season, two things are abundantly clear.
First, Notre Dame is as good as expected and will be in the College Football Playoff if it continues to win. That was not the case at this point in 2025, and its 5-0 start is a great relief to the Clashmore Four and Irish fans everywhere.
Second, the AP Poll is an absolute joke. This antiquated ranking system deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history, along with many other traditions of college football that have been jettisoned this century: regional schedules, longstanding rivalries, the very conferences upon which the foundation of college football was built, and even the notion of the amateur student-athlete.
The AP Poll once had an essential purpose: to bestow glory on the most worthy teams. Whether or not it hit the mark was half the fun of the system. Now, it’s meaningless. CFP rankings are the only rankings that count. It’s almost as if the 70 writers and broadcasters who currently hold votes know this. The poll results from week to week are, at best, laughable and, at worst, journalistic malfeasance.
Let’s take the mighty SEC as a case study. Without reading ahead, can you guess how many of the 16 SEC teams were ranked in the preseason poll? If you guessed nine, go celebrate with a Dr Pepper! The dynamic this creates is the literal definition of an ouroboros: a feedback loop that preserves the ranking of as many SEC teams as possible. Take Florida as the poster child. Unranked in the preseason, it cracked the Top 25 after pounding two FCS schools and then scraping by unranked Auburn to earn the No. 24 spot. It then pounced on an Ole Miss team suffering from a hangover after its revenge win over Lane Kiffin and LSU, instantly skyrocketing to No. 8. How did it respond? By laying an absolute egg the very next week against No. 25 Missouri. Florida dropped to No. 16, while Missouri jumped to No. 14. However, perhaps nothing beats how the AP Poll “punished” upstart Mississippi State. After rising from unranked to No. 16, it was the darling of the SEC heading into a showdown with Alabama. It was then taken behind the woodshed, losing at home 56-23. In response, the AP Poll dropped it all the way to … No. 17. The result for SEC teams: Wins elevate a team significantly in the rankings, while losses carry almost no penalty.
The SEC is not alone in this game, but it seemingly offers the lowest-hanging fruit for mocking the voters. The AP Poll is also not alone, as the Coaches Poll is almost as bad, although that argument is for another day. The age of the AP Poll has come and gone. What remains is insulting to almost every college football fan. The same writers and broadcasters who vote in this poll immediately turn around and mock it. It is an endless source of debate and weekly content for their media outlets. That is perhaps an even stronger example of an ouroboros. Perhaps in the near future, these same sportswriters and broadcasters will have the courage to self-correct and bring the AP Poll to a merciful end.
In the immortal words of Roy Batty in Blade Runner, all college football fans should hope the AP Poll will be “lost in time, like tears in rain.”
