College football rankings, as reflected in the national polls, are projections of how the teams will stack up at the end of the regular season. They are not, as currently practiced by voters, a measurement of what teams have achieved in the present moment.
If the polls were reflections of actual achievements and were not projections, Ohio State would very clearly be ranked above Michigan right now. The Buckeyes went into South Bend and beat Notre Dame. Michigan beat Rutgers and doesn’t have any high-end wins on its resume through four weeks of the season. It’s not even a close call, or at least, it shouldn’t be. Actual results, not future projections, should guide any weekly rankings effort in college football. That’s how we rank the 2024 Big Ten schools, with the four incoming Pac-12 schools — Washington, Oregon, USC, and UCLA — included.
Here we go: