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.
Every college town has a rhythm this time of year, and if you've lived inside one long enough, you stop needing a calendar to know the season is close. You can feel it. The hardware store on main street starts stocking team colors alongside the regular inventory. The diner that's kept the same game-day habit for as long as anyone can remember starts filling up earlier on weekday mornings. Conversation turns, slowly at first, then all at once.
I wrote the first column of this series back in July, when the board was fresh and the anticipation felt almost abstract. I want to come back to that idea now, not to reprise it, but because something has shifted. We are no longer waiting at a distance. The season is close enough that the waiting itself has changed character.
There is a version of anticipation that is comfortable and soft — the kind you carry around in the back of your mind through the summer, easy to set down when other life intervenes. And then there is this version. The kind that follows you into the grocery store. The kind that makes you check your phone for no good reason. The kind that turns a Tuesday afternoon into something charged with possibility.
That second kind is where we are right now.
Verdict has opened its preseason board with Ohio State at the top, a score of 94.5 based on Team Strength alone — because in the preseason, that is all there is to measure. No results to weigh. No late-game decisions that proved character or revealed a flaw. Just the structure of a program, evaluated against itself and against everyone else. It is the most honest kind of ranking, in a way, because it admits openly what it doesn't yet know.
And that is exactly the point. One hundred and thirty-eight programs are on this board, from Columbus to Cullowhee, from Baton Rouge to Bozeman. Every one of them enters the season with the same record. Every fan base woke up this morning with the same access to hope.
Somewhere this morning a first-generation fan is explaining the rivalry to a kid who is old enough now to really listen. In some town a band director is running one last rehearsal before the real thing. Somewhere a family is sorting through logistics for the drive to campus, the same drive they've made for years, wearing the same colors, arguing about the same exit. The ritual is not incidental to the sport. The ritual is part of why the sport holds.
I think sometimes we underestimate what the preseason is actually doing. We treat it as prologue — the necessary blank pages before the story begins. But the waiting is not empty. It is doing real work. It is reminding people why they care, connecting them back to the first time they cared, letting them rehearse the feelings that the season will eventually deliver in ways they can't control or predict.
No algorithm captures that. Verdict is honest enough to say so. A Team Strength score is the best available evidence about what a program brings to the field. It says nothing about the drive to campus, the tailgate that's been in the same parking spot for longer than most freshmen have been alive, the alma mater sung by people who haven't agreed on much else all week. Those things don't fit in a column, either. But they are the reason both exist.
The preseason board will change. It always does. The teams that look immovable in late summer have a way of revealing themselves once October arrives, and the teams that look like long shots have a way of making you feel foolish for doubting them. That is what the waiting is really in service of — the coming surprise. The thing none of us saw coming.
For now, every program in the country is tied. Every fan base is even. The season has not yet taken anything from anyone.
That's worth holding onto, even for just a little while longer.
See you next Saturday.
Why Bruns wrote this
The season_arrival angle is one I've visited before, but the board has matured since July — we're no longer at the distant edge of anticipation, we're inside it, and that shift in the quality of waiting deserved its own treatment. I wanted to honor the fact that the preseason board's honesty — scoring only what can be measured, admitting what it can't — is itself a kind of editorial grace note that most coverage skips past. And I wanted to write, at least once before results arrive, about the 138 programs as equals, because that equality is the most fleeting and beautiful fact in all of college football.
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.