LSU ranked No. 14 in AP Preseason Top 25 Poll

The Associated Press released its pre-season college football rankings Sunday, with last-year’s champion Ohio State sitting at the top spot.

The closest a college football program has been to a unanimous preseason number one team in the nation was Nick Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide in 2013 with 58 of 60 first place votes. The rest of the top five are TCU, Alabama, Baylor and Michigan State.

No Texas schools other than TCU and Baylor cracked the initial AP poll.

This is the first season since the Sooners’ national championship year in 2000 that they have been ranked as high as 19th in the first AP poll of the college season. They finished No. 2 in both 1998 and 2006 after being ranked No. 1 at the start of the year.

Since the preseason rankings began in 1950, no team has so unified the voters.

Your current Ohio State Buckeyes are ranked No. 1 by the AP for the 96th time. The Badgers are the reigning champs of the Big Ten West, and even though they have to replace last season’s national leading rusher, Melvin Gordon, his successor, Corey Clement, has big expectations to be Wisconsin’s next top back.

Eight Southeastern Conference teams (Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, LSU at No. 14, Mississippi at No. 17, Arkansas at No. 18, Missouri at No. 24 and Tennessee at No. 25) made the top 25, leading the poll.

Meanwhile, the No. 2 preseason team has been to the championship game four times since then, and won it all three times. On July 30, Ohio State announced that the players had violated team rules. Head coach Urban Meyer has said he will not announce the Buckeyes’ starter (either J.T. Barrett or Cardale Jones) before their September 7 opener at Virginia Tech.

The Seminoles, who open the season at home September 5 against Texas State, are one of three ACC teams in the poll. Sarkisian also apparently disparaged several of the Trojans’ Pac-12 rivals and ended his comments with a profane version of USC’s “Fight On” slogan.

Finley was in a four-way race for the job with Tommy Stuart, Alex Ogle and freshman Brett Rypien.