Despite not playing this Fall, Ohio State football is still ranked 2nd in the preseason AP Poll.
Ohio State will not be participating this Fall in college football. Despite three other conferences playing, the Big Ten will not be one of them. That means Ohio State will not have a chance to win a national championship this year. They won’t play until the Spring.
That didn’t stop members of the media from ranking them as the second-best team in the country. The Buckeyes are ranked 2nd in the preseason AP Poll for the 2020 season. Only Clemson is ranked ahead of them, which was also the case when the coaches poll was released.
What’s interesting is that after this week, voters can only rank teams that are actually playing in the Fall. So that means that the Big Ten teams will only see their names in the poll this week. Ohio State is joined by five other teams in the preseason poll.
Other than Ohio State being ranked 2nd, Penn State is 7, Wisconsin is 12, Michigan is 16, Minnesota is 18, and Iowa is 24. Only two other teams received votes in the poll, with those teams being Indiana and Northwestern.
It’s quite a shame that these teams won’t get to see their names in the polls again until 2021. It’s unclear if there will be any rankings in the Spring season. Any hope that Ohio State could somehow win an AP national championship without playing is also gone.
These are strange times that we live in. It’s only going to get stranger with college football being played on Saturdays without Ohio State football participating in such games.