The 2026 preseason coaches poll landed Tuesday. Ohio State sits on top with 38 of 72 first-place votes, and Indiana, which finished 16-0 and won the national championship in January, comes in sixth. Before that ordering gets read as a forecast, last August’s ballot is the more instructive document.
What the Preseason Coaches Poll Said Last August
Texas opened the 2025 season ranked first with 28 first-place votes. Ohio State was second, Penn State third, Georgia fourth, Notre Dame fifth, Clemson sixth. Indiana sat at No. 19.
Texas lost its opener at Ohio State, finished 10-3, and missed the playoff. Clemson went 7-6. Penn State had the worst of it. The Nittany Lions started 3-3, fired James Franklin in October, and got there by losing at UCLA as a 24.5-point favorite and then at home to Northwestern, 22-21, as a 21.5-point favorite. CBS Sports reported that the sequence made them the first FBS team since 1978 to drop consecutive games as favorites of 20 points or more.
Indiana beat Miami 27-21 on January 19 to close a perfect season. Anyone holding a preseason ticket collected at +10000. Sports Illustrated and Sportico both placed that behind only the 1999 St. Louis Rams at 150-1 among title winners in the major American leagues. The coaches had the Hoosiers nineteenth. Prices like that exist because backing an unproven team feels wrong to almost everybody at the time.
Same Seven Teams, Different Order
This year the coaches went Ohio State, Oregon, Georgia, Texas, Notre Dame, Indiana, Miami. As of August 1, the best available futures prices ran Ohio State +600, Notre Dame +700, Texas +750, Indiana and Oregon both +800, Georgia +900, Miami +1200.
Same seven names. The two lists agree on who sits first and who sits seventh, then disagree about almost everything between. Notre Dame is fifth on the ballot and second on the board. Georgia is third on the ballot and sixth on the board.
Schedule explains some of it. Notre Dame plays as an independent, which means no conference championship game and no gauntlet week in early December, and in a twelve-team bracket the path is worth something on its own. Whether it’s worth a three-spot gap in price, I don’t know. Strength of schedule is a judgment call, and the books and the coaches have plainly made it differently.
The favorite’s number is the other tell. CBS Sports noted that the +600 on Ohio State is tied for the longest preseason favorite price since records began in 2002, matching 2016 Alabama, and that no preseason favorite in that stretch had opened longer than +450. So the market is quoting less conviction about its own top choice than in any year on file. More than half the coaching panel put Ohio State first regardless.
Where the Tickets Go and Where the Money Goes
Futures splits in August are thin reading, but the shape of these is familiar. At BetMGM on August 1, Notre Dame held the largest ticket share at 17.5 percent while sitting second in handle at 15.3 percent. Ohio State ran the other way, with 11.9 percent of tickets and 16.6 percent of the money. Texas showed the same lean, 10.1 percent of tickets against 13.8 percent of handle. No other team cleared 5 percent of tickets.
More bettors are on Notre Dame and each of them is staking less. The money is heavier on Ohio State and Texas. That divergence is what public betting splits are for, though a futures market five months from resolution is a weak place to read one. Handle sits for a long time, a single injury reorders the board, and one book is not the market.
The Poll Deserves More Credit Than That
All of which makes the preseason coaches poll look worse than the record supports. PFF ran the numbers in July and found that 10 of the 12 champions of the College Football Playoff era were ranked in the preseason AP top five. The exceptions are LSU in 2019, which started sixth, and Indiana last season at twentieth.
So the poll does one job well and another badly. It’s good at naming the pool of teams that can win the thing. It’s poor at putting them in order, and only once in the playoff era has the preseason AP No. 1 finished a season No. 1, which was Alabama in 2017. Both facts can sit together without much trouble.
That cuts against treating Indiana as a template, too. A team the coaches ranked nineteenth going 16-0 is the outlier people will cite for a decade, which is precisely what makes it a poor foundation for anything. Ten of twelve is the base rate. Indiana is the exception.
What Changes Between August and January
Polls get recast weekly once games start, but the August edition is one snapshot from a room of coaches who have mostly not watched each other’s rosters since spring. A futures board doesn’t work that way. Miami opened at 20-1 in January, per ESPN, and traded near 11-1 by late July. Nobody voted on that. The price moved as transfers landed and money arrived, which is the ordinary mechanics of line movement.
The AP’s preseason top 25 is expected August 17, a second snapshot from a different room. It will probably resemble the coaches poll released this week, since these polls usually track each other, and it will also be frozen the moment it publishes. Ohio State has been quoted at or near +600 since January 19, through spring practice, the portal, and the opening of fall camp. More than six months of news arrived and the number barely moved. Whether that’s conviction or a market nobody has given a reason to reprice should start becoming clear around late September.