Our Way-Too-Early 2026 Top 25, Now That the Rosters Are In

Rosters are finally full, and GIE has refreshed its 2026 board with the one thing it was missing all summer: an accurate read on who's actually coming back. The headline ranking barely flinched. The tier just below it got turned inside out — and that gap is the most interesting thing on this page.

Here's where GIE has the 2026 field as fall camps open.

The Top 25

These are ratings, not win totals — think of each as a projected points-per-game margin against an average FBS team. Ohio State opens on top; the cutline into the Top 25 sits at Illinois.

The Top 25 held; the next tier didn't

Here's the part worth sitting with. Of 139 FBS teams, 130 changed rank once the full rosters were in — 68 up, 62 down. And yet the Top 25 above is nearly identical to what GIE had a month ago.

Both things are true because of where teams are bunched. At the top, Ohio State, Indiana, and Oregon are separated by margins a small nudge can't erase. Down in the 30-to-70 range, teams are stacked within a point of each other, so the same nudge vaults a program past ten of its neighbors. The churn isn't reshaping the playoff picture. It's reshaping the part of the sport where most of the season's surprises actually come from.

The biggest risers are almost entirely Group of Five and middle-tier Power Four teams returning the country's most experience. San Diego State climbed 15 spots, from 44th to 29th — the single largest jump into a higher tier. Tulane rose the same 15 (53rd to 38th). UTSA moved up 18 (60th to 42nd), the largest raw climb on the board. Florida gained 16 (61st to 45th), Northwestern 13 (47th to 34th), Boise State 13 (63rd to 50th), and Kansas State 12 (49th to 37th).

The falls are the mirror image — teams that emptied out. Memphis dropped 18 spots (45th to 63rd). Iowa State fell 14 (37th to 51st), Kansas and Arkansas 13 apiece, Houston 12, Navy and East Carolina 16 each. They slid because the players who generated last year's numbers are gone.

The honest caveats

A few, because this is the kind of page that's easy to over-sell.

This is a preseason projection with zero 2026 games in it. It's a starting line, not a finish. GIE's in-season engine doesn't have a single result to chew on yet, and it takes over the moment games kick off on August 29.

It rewards experience, which means it can undersell a young roster stacked with blue-chip freshmen who haven't logged a snap. Alabama at 22nd and the handful of other blue-bloods sitting lower than reflex expects are a read on roster turnover, not a verdict on their ceiling.

Camps are open. In four weeks the games start filling in the blanks, and the projections stop being projections. Until then, this is the clearest read we have — full rosters in, and every number on the page tracing back to something that actually happened on a field.