The Waiting Is the First Part of the Season
Before a single snap is played, the anticipation itself is a kind of tradition worth honoring.
Every college town has a rhythm in the days before the season opens, and if you pay attention, you can feel it shift.
Somewhere this morning, a student manager is taping ankles in a training room that smells like liniment and carpet cleaner. Somewhere a band director is running through one more rehearsal, watching the third row and thinking about the halftime show nobody outside the program has seen yet. Somewhere a diner that has kept the same game-day habit for as long as anyone can remember is already setting extra chairs.
None of that shows up in a rankings column. But it is all part of it.
This week, Verdict opens its preseason board for the 2026 season, and Ohio State sits at No. 1 with a Team Strength score of 94.5. That number represents everything a program brings into a season before the games begin — the depth, the roster construction, the infrastructure built across years of work. It is a fair and honest place to start a conversation.
But the honest thing about any preseason board is what it cannot yet know.
That is not a criticism. That is the whole point.
Every season, Verdict evaluates 133 programs — Ohio State and Ohio University, Alabama and Alcorn State, USC and Southern Utah. The same methodology, the same respect for evidence, the same willingness to look at the whole country rather than the same twelve schools the television cameras follow. In the preseason, only Team Strength is scored. The rest of the case, as it should be, gets written on the field.
I have always thought that arrangement tells you something important about the sport itself.
College football asks you to wait. It asks you to sit with your hopes before it tests them. The summer is long on purpose. August two-a-days happen behind closed gates. The depth chart is a rumor. The new coordinator's scheme is a theory. You hear things, you read things, and then — eventually — you drive to campus on a Saturday morning and you find out.
That waiting is not dead time. It is the sport doing something it has always done well: reminding you that it matters before it proves why.
I grew up around fans who understood this instinctively. They would spend the offseason re-reading old game programs, tracking the incoming class, arguing cheerfully over whether the new offensive line was deeper than the one they had remembered from some banner year past. They were not wasting time. They were maintaining a relationship. With a place, with a tradition, with a version of themselves that showed up every autumn and remembered who they were.
That is as true in Huntington and Statesboro and Boone as it is in Columbus. Probably truer, because in the smaller towns, the season is not entertainment — it is the organizing principle of the whole fall. The main street decorations go up. The same families claim the same tailgate spots. The radio voice who has called every home game since before most students were born clears his throat and gets ready.
Ohio State is No. 1 right now because the evidence says they have built something formidable. That is worth acknowledging. But 132 other programs are also on the board, and every one of them belongs to a community that has been waiting just as long, with just as much hope, for the exact same Saturday morning.
The preseason does not crown a champion. It opens a conversation. The season is the argument.
We are, all 133 programs and every fan base attached to them, at the same place right now: before kickoff. The case is still unwritten. The field has not decided anything yet. The waiting — patient, hopeful, a little restless — belongs equally to everyone.
That is worth remembering.
Why Bruns wrote this
The first column of a new voice should tell the reader what that voice believes before it tells them what it knows. The arrival of a season is the one moment when every program — No. 1 or unranked — is equal, and that equality is the most honest expression of what college football is. I wanted to say that plainly, and to say it in a way that feels like it belongs to the sport rather than to any one program or ranking.
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 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.
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.