I am grateful to have a vote in the Stats Perform FCS Top 25 media poll for the 2025 season. I’ll publish my ballot every week and provide some reasoning for my order.
Notes at the bottom.
FCS Top 25
1. North Dakota State
2. Montana State
3. South Dakota State
4. South Dakota
5. Tarleton State
6. Illinois State
7. Montana
8. Rhode Island
9. Idaho
10. Nicholls
11. Southern Illinois
12. Jackson State
13. UC Davis
14. North Dakota
15. Villanova
16. Southern Utah
17. Northern Arizona
18. Lehigh
19. Austin Peay
20. SFA
21. UIW
22. Abilene Christian
23. Tennessee Tech
24. Gardner-Webb
25. ETSU
Putting a Top 25 ballot together after Week 1 is much tougher than doing a preseason ballot. Preseason ballots are actually somewhat easy, ranking teams based on who they return, who they brought in, and what they did last year.
Doing a Top 25 after Week 1? Very tough.
How do you compare beating a good FCS team to beating a bad FBS team? How do you compare a Top 5 FCS team getting blown out against an FBS opponent to an FCS team lower in the rankings giving an FBS team a scare? How do you compare a ranked FCS team blowing out a non-D1 opponent to a ranked FCS team needing a comeback win vs. an unranked FCS team?
The good news is, people usually don’t remember where they were ranked on Sept. 1 when October and November hit. Still, rankings set the stage for upcoming games and can be important on playoff resumes.
There’s no need to compare team movement on this ballot to my preseason ballot. Huge movement should occur early in the season instead of hanging on to preseason notions.
I’ll go more in-depth in explaining team positioning and movement next week as we get more FCS vs. FCS competition to gauge. I wrote some quick thoughts on Week 1 games here. Rationalizing rankings right now could just result in circular point/counterpoint arguments. We might know less about a lot of teams now than we did in the preseason.
FCS vs. FBS results are such a mixed bag in telling the full story of how good a team really is. Of the six FCS over FBS wins last year, three of those FCS winners didn’t even make the playoffs, and a fourth exited in the second round. There were also a dozen one-score FCS vs. FBS losses last year, and many of those teams didn’t end up doing too much. And there are examples of highly-ranked FCS teams getting embarrassed by FBS opponents, and then going on to make deep playoff runs. Things will sort themselves out as more FCS vs. FCS and ranked vs. ranked games are upcoming, and resumes get filled out more.
