You know college football season is right around the corner when the Associated Press releases its preseason Top 25.
Georgia is on top of the poll, comfortably ahead of No. 2 Ohio State. Big Ten newcomer Oregon ranks third, SEC newcomer Texas is fourth and Alabama, minus Nick Saban, is fifth.
To look at the bigger picture and just how good — or bad — the Top 25 teams could be this season, we turned to our ESPN Football Power Index (FPI). FPI projected win totals for every team based on 20,000 simulations of the entire season performed by our ESPN Stats & Information team, but to find a high and low, we used the middle 90% of those simulations. That gave us a ceiling and a floor in terms of expected record for each team in 2024, with extremely unlikely outliers eliminated. In other words, we identified the realistic best-case and worst-case scenarios for every…
