College football is in the air with the release of the USA TODAY Sports AFCA Coaches Poll on Monday.
Texas opens the season at No.12 and TCU at No.16, the newspaper revealed in its first Top 25 list of 2023. It was based on voting from 66 college football across the country.
Two-time defending national champion Georgia was ranked No.1. The Bulldogs received 61 first-place votes, the newspaper reported.
Michigan will start at No.2, its highest-ever preseason ranking in the coaches poll. The Wolverines did not receive any of the additional five first-place votes but will begin the campaign ahead of Alabama, Ohio State, and LSU.
Alabama picked up four first-place votes and came in No.3 in the poll. The Crimson Tide was ranked No.3 twice in the coaches poll before winning national championships in 2015 and 2020.
Ohio State claimed the remaining first-place vote and will open at No.4 overall.
LSU rounds out the top 5 at No.5, giving the SEC three teams — Georgia, Alabama, and LSU — in the top five.
A fourth, Tennessee, will start the season at No.10.
Others in the top 10 include USC at No.6, Penn State at No.7, Florida State at No.8, and Clemson at No.9.
Two other Big 12 teams made the Top 25. Oklahoma is at No.19, its lowest preseason position since 2015, the newspaper reported. Texas Tech broke back into the preseason rankings for the first time since 2008 at No.24.
Texas Coach Steve Sarkisian’s team goes into its final Big 12 season as the conference favorite for the first time since 2009.
“I think this team is on a mission; they’ve taken this mindset of being on a mission. They’ve kind of adopted the John Wick mentality,” Sarkisian said at a news conference last week, according to ESPN. “I think that they’ve kind of assumed this mentality of, ‘Embrace the hate.’ We get it. We’re the University of Texas, we get it. This is our last year in the Big 12. We can sit there and be a punching bag, or we can go attack the people that we’re going to play. And I think that they’ve assumed that responsibility to say, hey, we’re gonna go after everybody else too. I think that that’s the right mentality to have.”
The Longhorns begin fall practice with optimism because of quarterback Quinn Evers in his second season.
“You see the dedication the guy’s put into his overall body composition; he really has bought into his diet. He’s bought into the workouts,” Sarkisian said of Evers. “That takes a lot of discipline and dedication and focus. I think clearly, you know, he’s in a great frame of mind. This feels like his team. He leads that way, you can hear how he talks to the team that way.”
None of the coaches expect TCU to return to the national championship game, which it lost last season to Georgia in a rout. Quarterback Max Duggan is gone, and so, perhaps, is some of the magic. Coach Sonny Sykes isn’t so sure.
“I think we’ve got tremendous speed and playmaking ability, and we’re a year further along,” Dykes told ESPN during the offseason. “I really like what we’re doing offensively. I think it fits the skill set of our quarterbacks. I think they’re excited about the direction of the offense. So I don’t know how much different it’s going to look to the typical fan in the stands, but it’s going to be a little bit different.”
Read the full USA Today coaches poll here.
