Every offseason we have to do the same song and dance. It’s honestly the only song and dance I enjoy less than the Cupid Shuffle. We get it Nance, you don’t know which is your left or right when you slide, now excuse me as I one hop one time into an Uber far away from here.
ESPN released their initial FPI rankings for the 2026 season, and this will shock you – it’s loaded with SEC bias. Sorry, I meant SEC teams. No instrument has been used more, besides twitter thumbs, to carry the water for anti-SEC conversations than the ESPN FPI rankings. It’s the gift that keeps on giving for Big Ten country and Danny Kannell. You can’t really blame them, either.
Over the last two seasons the SEC has had 11 and 13 teams ranked in the preseason FPI top-25 respectively. In 2024, 45 percent of the teams ranked in the initial top-25 finished unranked. In 2025, the number rose to 54 percent. It’s not just the SEC that has seen ridiculous levels of inaccuracies in the FPI poll. In both years, 48 percent of the preseason teams finished unranked.
Perhaps the most damning part of it is that over the last two seasons there have been just three teams that were ranked outside of the top ten, out of 13 total, that finished ranked at all. Two of those teams were Ole Miss.
That’s a pretty bad percentage from the world wide leader in sports. The thing that makes it even more frustrating is that the College Football Playoff committee still uses these specific metrics when it comes to comparing and contrasting resumés before they select the 12 team playoff field.
But, hear me out, guys.
What if being this incorrect about one specific league was the plan all along. What if ESPN has just been playing the long game here and is trying to make the SEC look bad intentionally. How else would you explain them ranking an Arkansas team that went 2-10 at No. 22? Or, a South Carolina team that went 4-8 at No. 15? Both of those things happened last season.
The only explanation is corruption at the highest level to dethrone the SEC by the very entity that has been blamed with propping it up in the first place. It’s diabolical. It’s devious. It’s probably expert-level gaslighting on my part, twisting the narrative into something so absurd that someone, somewhere, is guaranteed to believe it.
Consider this my contribution to the never-ending cycle of offseason debates that no one actually wins. Anyway, 57 more days until SEC football.
