What the Empty Columns on the Preseason Board Are Actually Saying
A score without completed games isn't an incomplete thought — it's the most precise statement analytics can make in August.
There is a specific kind of honesty that only exists before things begin.
Verdict opens its 2026 preseason board with Ohio State at No. 1, a score of 94.5, and beside that number, a row of columns that haven't been filled in yet. No completed games. No field evidence. Just Team Strength — the one thing the system can actually measure right now — and then open space where the season will eventually write its own argument.
Most people glance past that open space. I keep stopping there.
Here is what I think those empty columns are saying: the board knows what it knows, and it knows what it doesn't. That's a harder thing to build than it sounds. A lot of systems — not just in sports — find ways to fill empty space with inference dressed up as measurement, with confidence projections that quietly paper over ignorance. Verdict doesn't do that. In the preseason, Team Strength is scored. The rest of the case waits. The blank is load-bearing.
One hundred and thirty-eight programs sit on this board. That's the full width of the sport — Ohio State and programs whose home stadiums the national media couldn't find on a map, programs in small cities where the game-day economy runs on a different scale entirely, programs that have been quietly building something the algorithm hasn't had enough evidence to fully reward yet. Every one of them, right now, has the same empty columns. The field hasn't spoken for any of them.
That structural equality is easy to overlook because the Team Strength scores are not equal. Ohio State's 94.5 is not the same as a program sitting in the back half of the board. The gap is real, and the board doesn't pretend otherwise. But those empty columns belong equally to everyone, and what fills them is not prestige or history or the opinion of a television studio. It's football games, played on grass and turf, in front of the people who drove two hours to be there.
That's the part that still gets me, after all the seasons I've watched.
Analytics platforms often get described as cold — as systems that strip the sentiment out of the sport and leave you with a number. I don't think that's what's happening here. What the preseason board actually reveals is that the system is honest about its own limits. It won't guess. It won't fill the column with something that sounds like evidence but isn't. It will wait for the field to produce something real, and then it will measure that real thing carefully.
There is a philosophy buried in that structure, and it happens to be the same philosophy that makes college football worth caring about in the first place: you have to play the games. Reputation doesn't count. The offseason conversation doesn't count. What happens between the lines on a Saturday afternoon — that counts, and nothing else does, and every program gets the same chance to make its case.
Somewhere right now, a coordinator at a program nowhere near the top of this board is looking at an opponent's tendency that he thinks nobody else has noticed. He might be right. If he is, and if his players execute what he's drawn up, the board will reflect it. Not immediately. Not with fanfare. But the evidence accumulates, and the system is paying attention.
That's not nothing. That's actually the promise of the whole enterprise — that good football, played anywhere, by anyone, eventually shows up in the record.
The 2026 season hasn't produced a single data point yet. Ohio State's 94.5 is the most the board can say right now, and the board says it clearly. Everything else is still open.
The empty columns aren't waiting to be filled in. They're waiting to be earned.
Why Bruns wrote this
The editor was right to flag that I'd circled the waiting-and-arrival frame too many times without adding new shape. What I hadn't done was actually examine the structure of the preseason board itself — specifically, what it means that Verdict leaves its unplayed columns genuinely blank rather than filling them with projected inference. That's a real editorial philosophy worth unpacking, and it gives me somewhere new to go with the same underlying facts. The column also lets me say something true about the sport's democratic promise without leaning on familiar atmosphere passages to carry the weight.
This column was inspired by real events and data from Verdict — context, not justification. The evidence is impartial; the perspective is Bruns Cole's.
Earlier columns about the same team and rivalry.
What 94.5 Knows and What It Doesn't
Ohio State opens the board at No. 1 with a Team Strength score the evidence supports — and that score is also the clearest possible statement of what preseason evaluation cannot do.
The Whole Country Holds Still for a Moment
Before the first snap of 2026, college football belongs equally to everyone — and that is the only time all season that will be true.
The Board Is Open. The Rest Is Still Being Written.
Verdict has evaluated 138 programs and assigned every one a starting point — but what makes the waiting feel different this year is how honestly that starting point admits what it doesn't know.
The Waiting Has Always Been Part of the Game
Before a single snap, the anticipation itself is doing something to every fan base in the country — and that's not nothing.