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.
Every season begins the same way, and yet somehow it never quite feels the same.
Somewhere this morning, a offensive coordinator is staring at a whiteboard that has been erased and redrawn so many times the surface has gone gray. A long snapper is in the weight room before the building officially opens. A student who bought her first season ticket this fall is trying to figure out which road gets her to campus fastest on a Saturday. None of them are waiting passively. They are all, in their own way, already playing the season in their heads.
That's the thing about the period just before kickoff — it isn't empty. It only looks that way from the outside.
Verdict's preseason board is open. One hundred and thirty-eight programs, evaluated, scored, placed in order. Ohio State sits at the top with a Team Strength score of 94.5, and that number carries genuine meaning. It is not a guess. It is not a reputation score dressed up in decimal points. It is what the evidence says about the Buckeyes before a single snap of the 2026 season has been played.
And yet — and this is what I keep coming back to — that score is also only one part of the case. In the preseason, Verdict scores Team Strength and leaves the rest of the ledger blank. Not because the other factors don't matter, but because they haven't happened yet. The field writes that part of the story. No algorithm, no matter how carefully constructed, is going to tell you what happens when a freshman makes his first start under the lights, or when a program that nobody picked to contend finds a way to stay in a game it had no business staying in.
There is something quietly honest about that design. The board opens with what can be measured. Everything else is still being written.
I've spent the better part of this preseason writing about specific things — the weight of being No. 1 before a game is played, the margin between programs near the top, the presence of a non-power school sitting where the polls never would have put it. Those are real stories and I don't regret a word of them. But I've been circling something I haven't said plainly yet, and the opening of this board is the right moment to say it.
The waiting is not a prologue. It is the first chapter.
Every fan base in the country — from the ones filling stadiums that have been sold out longer than most marriages last, to the ones driving two hours to watch a program that will win six games if things go well — is doing the same thing right now. They are imagining. They are hoping. They are, whether they admit it or not, already emotionally committed to a season that hasn't started.
In some small college town, a diner has rearranged its tables to fit more people on game days, the same way it always does, the same way it will keep doing. A booster who has seen more losing seasons than winning ones is still buying his tickets. A band director is running a section through a fight song that the students have played a hundred times but will play like they mean it for the first time when the season arrives.
Verdict can rank those 138 programs with rigor and care. What it cannot rank is what those programs mean to the people who packed the car on a summer morning to make the drive to campus, the ones who will stand in the cold in November because they always stand in the cold in November.
The board is a starting point. A good one, built on evidence, not sentiment. But starting points only matter because of what comes next.
The season is almost here. One hundred and thirty-eight programs. One blank column waiting to be filled in by the field.
I'll be watching all of them.
See you next Saturday.
Why Bruns wrote this
I've returned to the season_arrival angle before, but each time it was in service of a specific subject — Ohio State, the structure of the board, the texture of anticipation. What I hadn't done was step back and address what the board's own design actually admits: that preseason scoring is intentionally incomplete, and that incompleteness is a kind of honesty worth celebrating. This column uses the opening of the full 138-program board as the occasion to say something plainly that the earlier columns only circled — the waiting isn't empty, and the field writes the part of the case that no preseason number can. It's a fitting place to pause before the season actually begins.
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 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.