There’s a number buried in every preseason AP poll that predicts more about a defending champion’s season than anything printed above it. Call it the Five-Slot Trapdoor: open a title defense outside the top five, and recent history says the season doesn’t just go sideways, it ends with the team gone from the poll entirely. Ohio State and Oregon are getting the headlines this week for parking the Big Ten at Nos. 1 and 2, the first time one conference has swept the preseason top two spots in 65 years. The more interesting story sits six slots down, where defending national champion Indiana just walked through that trapdoor.
The Big Ten Hasn’t Run the Poll Like This Since 1961
Start with the part everyone’s already talking about, because the numbers back up the hype. Ohio State opened at No. 1 with 40 of the 69 available first-place votes, more than half the electorate on its own, and Oregon took 14 more at No. 2. Add Indiana’s eight and Big Ten teams accounted for the overwhelming majority of every first-place vote cast in the entire poll. Ohio State and Oregon headlining the preseason release marks just the second time in AP poll history that one conference has held both of the top two spots, and the first time it’s been the Big Ten since 1961, when Iowa sat at No. 1 and Ohio State at No. 2.
Oregon’s No. 2 is its highest preseason ranking ever. The Ducks had opened as high as No. 3 four separate times and never higher, which tells you how much last season’s run actually moved the program’s ceiling in the eyes of voters. Here’s the full top of the release, courtesy of Chris Hummer’s rundown as the poll dropped:
https://twitter.com/chris_hummer/status/2089382874122260523
Everything through No. 5 is exactly what you’d expect from a preseason poll built around name recognition and returning production: Georgia, Notre Dame, Texas. No. 6 is where it gets strange.
Why Is Indiana Ranked Outside the Top 5 as Defending Champ?
Indiana went 16-0 last season and won the national title, and voters still opened 2026 with the Hoosiers at No. 6, giving them eight first-place votes. Four of Indiana’s 2026 opponents finished the 2025 season ranked, a schedule tough enough that voters treated the unbeaten run as unproven against elite competition rather than a finished résumé.
That’s a defensible read of the schedule. I made the case two weeks ago that Indiana’s floor beats Ohio State’s ceiling — 60 returning players from a title team is a roster-construction advantage nobody else in this poll can claim, and nothing about that changed between then and now. What changed is where I’d point the worry. It isn’t whether Indiana’s roster holds up. It’s whether a No. 6 preseason ranking is, on its own, a signal worth taking seriously, independent of how good the team actually is.
The Five-Slot Trapdoor: The Four-Team Pattern Indiana Just Joined
Here’s the pattern, cross-checked against the AP poll archive rather than taken on faith: in each of the last four instances a defending national champion opened its title-defense preseason poll outside the top five, that team finished the same season completely unranked.
Michigan won it all in 2023, then opened 2024 at No. 9 and finished 8-5, receiving votes but never cracking the final Top 25. LSU opened 2020 at No. 6, dropped out of the rankings in October, and never got back in. Auburn opened 2011 at No. 23 and finished 8-5, unranked. LSU opened 2008 at No. 7 and finished 8-5, also unranked. Four different rosters, four different coaching staffs, four different conferences, and the same ending every time: not a down year, a full disappearance from the poll.
The top-five cutoff isn’t arbitrary bookkeeping, either. A preseason top-five ranking functions as a credit line with the electorate — voters extend real benefit of the doubt through an early hiccup or a shaky road win, because the ranking itself was built on trust in the roster. Slide to No. 6 or lower and that credit line is already thinner before a single snap. One bad week doesn’t cost a top-five team its ranking. One bad week can bury a No. 6 team fast, because the voters who put them there were already hedging.
Four for four is a real streak, not a large enough sample to call ironclad forecasting. But it’s specific enough that Indiana landing at No. 6, the same slot 2020 LSU opened at, deserves more attention than a shrug. The gap between Indiana’s roster and those four teams’ rosters might be the whole story here. Julian Sayin walking into Ohio State’s huddle with a full year of continuity already banked is exactly the stability that keeps a preseason ranking from wobbling. Indiana returning 60 players from an undefeated team is a stronger foundation than any of the last four teams that fell through this trapdoor had. Whether that foundation is enough to break the streak is the actual question this season answers.
The SEC’s Depth Argument Isn’t Dead, Either
None of this means the SEC quietly disappeared. The conference still has seven of the top 13 teams and nine of the full Top 25, more ranked teams than any other league by a wide margin. Georgia sits at No. 3, Texas at No. 5, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Oklahoma, LSU and Alabama fill out most of the rest of the top 13. The Big Ten taking the top two spots and the SEC still owning the depth chart underneath it are both true at the same time. They’re not competing facts.
What’s not holding is the top of Alabama’s own résumé. The Crimson Tide dropped to No. 13, ending a 17-year run of opening inside the preseason top 10, a streak that outlasted three coaching changes and had become close to an assumption in this poll. That’s one program’s decline, not the conference’s.
Ohio State visits Texas in Week 2, a game that will move the poll regardless of where anyone opened it. Indiana’s four games against last season’s ranked teams will tell us inside of a month whether the Hoosiers are the exception to a four-team pattern or just the fifth name on a list nobody wants to join. I know which side of that bet I’d rather be on, and it isn’t the one Indiana’s currently sitting on.
