No college football season is truly off and running until we get our first couple of top-10 clashes and top-10 upsets. In Week 2, we checked both boxes, with Texas storming back dramatically to beat Ohio State at home and Oregon getting stunned by an Oklahoma State team that had just lost its season opener at Tulsa. Throw in the confusion of how to rate Michigan following two very different results (the controversial finish against Western Michigan, a win against Oklahoma), and you can see why college football voters have their hands full trying to fill out a ballot in mid-September.
Thankfully, you, the college football fan, do not carry the same burden as us here at CBS Sports. We rank every FBS team every single week for the CBS Sports 138, using ballots from experts at CBS Sports and 247Sports to compile a composite ranking set of the entire landscape. It allows us to identify not just the cut off at 25, like the major polls, but also what it looks like around the top 40, top 50 and beyond.
So when teams like Oklahoma or Illinois take those harmful losses, we don't just bounce them from our ballots but instead find an exact spot to place them in the full 138-team set. The easy decision, it seems, was to put Texas at the No. 1 spot. The Longhorns were not a unanimous pick for No. 1 but carry a heavy ballot average advantage over Georgia at No. 2.
The Bulldogs and Miami are also about a half-step ahead of Notre Dame at No. 4, which leads a crowded set of contenders that includes Ohio State (down to No. 5 after the loss), Indiana (trending up with another lopsided win) and LSU, which is still riding high off the very loud opening win against Clemson. Those seven teams are the top tier for our voters, who then have different opinions within the next couple of tiers. Our voters seem to agree that it's touch to discern differences between Alabama, Ole Miss, Texas A&M and USC (all with ballot averages between 9.3 and 10.6), but that group does have a consistent for being ahead of the likes of Texas Tech, Tennessee and Penn State, which all have a ballot average between 15.0 and 15.6.
Shuffling of the tiers doesn't make for too many major adjustments within the top 25 outside of the change at No. 1, but there are plenty of big adjustments throughout the top 60. We have identified some of those in the Mover's Report, which you can find below the top 25 table. College football experts from CBS Sports and 247Sports contribute ballots each week, which are averaged together for our rankings.
You can see the top 25 below and 26-138 on our rankings page. Check out the rest of the CBS Sports 138: Teams ranked 26-138
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