The Alabama Crimson Tide will begin the college football season ranked No. 1 in the country, according to the Associated Press preseason Top 25 poll released this week. It marks the ninth time in program history that Alabama has opened a season atop the AP poll, and the second consecutive year the Tide have been tabbed the preseason favorite after falling to Georgia in last season’s national championship game.
Alabama collected 54 of the 63 first-place votes cast by the AP’s panel of media members. Ohio State picked up six first-place votes and was slotted second, while defending national champion Georgia received the remaining three first-place votes and was ranked third. Clemson rounds out the top four, followed by Notre Dame, Texas A&M, Utah, Michigan, Oklahoma and Baylor to complete the top 10.
Being an overwhelming preseason pick is nothing new in Tuscaloosa, but the margin is telling. With more than five of every six first-place ballots, the Tide entered the season as the closest thing college football has to a consensus choice, and the expectation carries a weight of its own. Alabama has lived on that side of the ledger often enough to know the drill: the target on its back is as large as the preseason poll itself, and every ranked opponent between September and the SEC championship game will treat the trip as a chance to reshape the season.
The poll’s architecture also reflects how the sport’s hierarchy settled after last year’s title game. Georgia, which won the national championship, starts third, a rarity for a defending champion and a testament to how much talent both the Bulldogs and Buckeyes returned. Ohio State’s No. 2 slot and six first-place votes make the Nov. 1-December stretch of the season a roadmap of potential semifinal collisions, with the Big Ten champion, the SEC champion and Clemson all projected to be in the chase deep into the fall.
The rest of the Top 25
Oregon opens the season at No. 11, trailed by Oklahoma State, North Carolina State, USC and Michigan State. Miami checks in at No. 16, with Pitt and Wisconsin at 17 and 18, respectively. Three Southeastern Conference programs — Arkansas, Kentucky and Ole Miss — occupy the No. 19 through No. 21 spots. Wake Forest, Cincinnati, Houston and BYU close out the rankings at No. 22 through No. 25.
The middle and bottom of the poll are where preseason ballots tend to be most unreliable, and this year’s list is no exception. Oregon and USC are new-look West Coast contenders, North Carolina State is chasing an Atlantic Coast Conference breakthrough, and Cincinnati is defending an unbeaten regular season in the American Athletic Conference after the Bearcats’ breakthrough run a year ago. Each has the schedule and the roster to climb, and each will get an early chance to prove the voters right or wrong.
SEC depth on display
In total, six SEC teams landed in the preseason Top 25, and six additional conference members — Tennessee, LSU, Mississippi State, Auburn, Florida and South Carolina — received at least one vote without cracking the rankings. Only Missouri and Vanderbilt failed to receive any votes among SEC programs.
That means twelve of the league’s fourteen members started the season with at least a glimmer of national recognition, a depth few conferences can match. For Auburn and Florida, the votes reflect the perpetual expectation that a marquee program is one coaching adjustment or quarterback development away from relevance. For Tennessee and LSU, they reflect rosters that analysts believe are trending upward. It also means the SEC’s internal schedule guarantees attrition: with that many ranked and vote-receiving teams sharing a league slate, somebody good is going to lose every week, and the conference standings will be as unforgiving as ever.
A quiet Sun Belt presence
Appalachian State was the sole Sun Belt Conference team to receive votes in the poll, though not enough to land inside the Top 25. That detail matters in South Alabama’s corner of the college football map. The Mountaineers have been the Sun Belt’s standard-bearer since joining the league, and their steady stream of Top 25 consideration sets the competitive bar every other program in the conference measures itself against, including the Jaguars.
South Alabama, which plays its home games in Mobile, has been building toward exactly that kind of national notice. The program’s trajectory through the Sun Belt — from a young FBS startup to a bowl-regular under its recent coaching staffs — has been one of the steadier growth stories in the region, and the league’s national television exposure has grown alongside it. The Jaguars’ schedule each fall now includes the kind of conference opponents that can swing a division race, and the league’s improving reputation means nonconference wins carry more weight than they once did.
Jaguars build close to home
While the national spotlight is on Tuscaloosa, the University of South Alabama football program has been busy building for the future closer to home. The Jaguars added their third verbal commitment for the 2023 recruiting class last week when Blount High School offensive lineman Willis Anderson announced on social media that he intends to sign with the program.
Verbal commitments are non-binding until a prospect signs a national letter of intent, but each one is a building block, and the early July additions gave the Jaguars’ staff a foundation in the 2023 class well before the high school season began. Landing a commitment from a Mobile County public school also continues the program’s long emphasis on recruiting its immediate backyard — the Mobile area has produced SEC and NFL talent for generations, and keeping homegrown players close to home has been a priority for every coaching staff that has led the Jaguars.
The fit makes sense on both sides. Anderson plays offensive line, the position group that takes the longest to develop and the one programs most need to stock in every class. Blount, a longtime Mobile County program, has a history of sending players to the college ranks, and its roster gives college recruiters a regular stop every fall. For a Mobile-area prospect, South Alabama offers the chance to play close to family while competing in the Sun Belt against conference opponents across the Southeast.
Why the local pipeline matters
Programs such as South Alabama live or die on the strength of their regional recruiting. Unlike national brands, the Jaguars cannot count on signing blue-chip prospects from across the country; their classes are built on relationships with high school coaches in Mobile, Baldwin and Washington counties and on identifying players who fit the staff’s scheme before bigger programs do. Every early commitment from a local school accomplishes two things at once: it fills a need in the class, and it signals to the next prospect that the Jaguars’ staff is present and persistent in his gym and on his sideline.
The timing also matters. Summer is when rising seniors take unofficial visits, attend camps and weigh offers before their final seasons begin. A class with three public commitments by midsummer gives a coaching staff momentum to show every recruit who comes through the next few months — proof that other players have already chosen Mobile, and that the class is filling up.
For Alabama fans along the Gulf Coast, the week’s news offered something for everyone. At the top of the sport, the state’s flagship program begins another season with the No. 1 ranking and the burden that comes with it. Closer to home, the South Alabama Jaguars kept quietly assembling the class that will represent Mobile for years to come. One story is about maintaining a dynasty; the other is about building one, one commitment at a time.
What the poll says about the season ahead
Preseason polls are, at best, informed guesses, and the AP’s voters have been wrong often enough to keep the regular season interesting. But the shape of this ballot tells observers what to watch. If Alabama handles its usual SEC gauntlet, the likely season-shaping questions involve the Ohio State-Michigan rematch in the Big Ten and whether Georgia can reload fast enough to make the College Football Playoff field again as a chasing team rather than the hunted.
The first regular-season AP poll after opening weekend will begin the sorting. Programs that open against ranked nonconference opponents — a list that historically includes several teams in this poll — can make an immediate statement, while conference play determines most of the rest. By the time the first College Football Playoff rankings arrive in early November, the preseason No. 1 label will have been tested, confirmed or discarded, just as it has in every season before this one.
For now, Alabama’s ninth preseason No. 1 ranking is a statement of continuity rather than surprise. The program has been in this position enough times that the poll’s verdict read less like a prediction than a habit — the expectation that Tuscaloosa remains the sport’s center of gravity until somebody proves otherwise on the field.
The recruiting calendar keeps rolling
While veterans report for fall camp and freshmen move in, recruiting never pauses. Coaching staffs across the country spend August juggling camp preparation with the final stretch of summer evaluation, and South Alabama’s staff is no exception. The Jaguars’ third commitment of the 2023 cycle arrived at a moment when every program is trying to close out its board before the season distracts everyone.
The 2023 class will sign in December or February, and between now and then official visits, senior film and late offers will reshuffle boards across the Sun Belt. But the early commitments matter for tone-setting: they anchor the class, they help assistants prioritize their travel, and they give fans the first concrete sense of what the future roster will look like. For the Jaguars, the blend of Mobile-area talent and regional prospects is a familiar and sensible formula — the same formula that built every successful roster the program has fielded.
The connection between the two headlines in this story is closer than it might appear. Alabama’s dominance sets the ceiling for football in the state, and programs like South Alabama grow by developing the players the big programs wait on — prospects who develop late, or who want to stay close to home, or who want a chance to play immediately. The Mobile area supplies talent to all levels, and every recruiting win in the city’s backyard is a reminder that the sport’s geography runs straight through the Gulf Coast.
When the season kicks off, the Jaguars will begin their own September in front of home fans in Mobile, chasing a Sun Belt West division title that would put them on the same kind of national stage their in-state neighbor occupies every autumn. The path there starts with classes like this one, built player by player, commitment by commitment, from the high school fields of Mobile County to the college rosters of the Gulf Coast.