With the 2023 college football season just over one week from officially kicking off, we’re right in the heart of preseason rankings season.
The USA TODAY Coaches Poll and AP Top 25 have already been released with both polls showing the Tigers as the No. 5 team. ESPN has now put out its own power rankings, and it concurs with the polls as LSU comes in at fifth.
ESPN’s Chris Low writes that this team has a College Football Playoff ceiling if all goes right but with a tough schedule could fall into the middle of the pack in the SEC in the worst-case scenario.
Best case: College Football Playoff semifinal. Nobody saw LSU getting to the SEC championship game a year ago, especially after getting pummeled by Tennessee 40-13 at home the second week of October. But the Tigers picked themselves up off the turf, kept getting better, and Brian Kelly squeezed everything and then some out of his first LSU team. His second team will be even deeper. Kelly knows more about this team, and most importantly, the Tigers have a seasoned quarterback, Jayden Daniels, who has proven on big stages he can beat teams both passing and running. If LSU can manage to get through the month of September unscathed, that Nov. 4 game at Alabama could end up being a play-in game for the playoff.
Worst case: 8-5 with losses to Florida State, Ole Miss, Alabama, Texas A&M and the bowl opponent. The Tigers finished 10-4 last season, and that was with losses in two of their final three games. Winning just eight games as an encore to what LSU did a year ago would be a disappointment on the Bayou. But there aren’t a lot of easy outs on LSU’s schedule, and the September slate is filled with potholes. Getting Alabama in Tuscaloosa this season automatically makes it a more difficult schedule, and four of the first six games are away from Tiger Stadium. LSU’s talent level is such that there shouldn’t be a significant drop-off, but making it back to the SEC championship game will prove difficult. — Chris Low
There’s a decent chance the true result will fall somewhere in the middle of these two outcomes as it did last fall, but the Tigers will hope to push toward the higher end of that range with a team that looks to be talented enough to compete for a playoff spot.
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https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/38108853/college-football-preseason-2023-power-rankings