There was a big difference in belief for the Oklahoma Sooners in the two major preseason polls ahead of the 2025 college football season.
On Monday, the Sooners came in at No. 18 in the preseason AP Top 25, which is voted on by media around the country. However, last week, for the first time since 1999, OU was nowhere to be found in the top 25 of the preseason coaches poll, which head coaches (supposedly) vote on. The Sooners were the first team out while at least receiving votes.
In this case, though, maybe the college football coaches don't actually know ball.
Preseason AP Top 25 favors Sooners compared to coaches poll
The easiest takeaway would be to toss any and all preseason rankings. Today, with constantly changing rosters, it's nearly impossible to predict how teams will fare when the season actually kicks off. However, preseason rankings and predictions are all we really have to gauge in the heat of August, so they're nearly impossible for college football loyalists to ignore.
It's the media's job to try and predict all that, though, at least this time of year. I can speak from experience. While others are at work, so is the media, researching and learning about not just the team they cover, but especially as college football fans, understand the national landscape as a whole.
Meanwhile, college football coaches are in the midst of fall camp trying to decide depth charts and implement systems. While the rest of us are reading breaking news all offseason about what team added who out of the Transfer Portal and who was lost, college football coaches are the ones doing all that scouting and recruiting for their own rosters. It's not that college football coaches don't know the game, but they probably don't know what's going on in the sport. It's not their job to know.
With that crammed schedule, there's always the chance someone from the school's athletic department is voting on coaches polls as a proxy for their head coach. But even they're focused on their own football program with tunnel vision.
So if there's any preseason poll for Sooner Nation to lose sleep over between now and Aug. 30, it's not the coaches poll.
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