Anybody can rank the best teams, but only The Bottom 25 ranks the worst each week in college football
8 min read
There’s been a lot of time spent discussing how vulnerable all the top teams in college football look this season. Ohio State has already lost a game, Clemson is 2-2 and looking lost, Oklahoma can’t pull away from anybody and even Alabama had a scare put into it. What isn’t being discussed nearly as much, however, is how the bottom of the rankings have experienced something similar.
For the most part, The Bottom 25 is still filled with the usual suspects, but a few of the schools who annually compete for Bottom 25 titles aren’t ranked at the moment (your UTEPs and ULMs). That’s interesting, but it’s something else that encourages me. Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time in this space explaining how much more difficult it is to go winless than undefeated at the FBS level. I also root for every team to win at least one game each season because everybody who puts the amount of work in that’s required to play, or coach, at an FBS program deserves that feeling at least once.
So far, the 2021 season suggests this is likely. As things stand, only seven winless teams remain (there are 26 undefeated teams). While I haven’t kept official records, anecdotally, that seems like a low number of winless teams this early in the season. If things continue moving like this, not only will everybody get a win, but it’ll make for a more exciting Bottom 25 race.
No Longer Ranked: Central Michigan (25), Temple (24), Northern Illinois (23), Colorado State (21), ULM (16)
