AP Top 25 Preseason Football: ranked by AI-Readiness

The AP Preseason Top 25 ranks the nation's best football programs. AIREDEX ranked them on something else entirely.

Every August, the AP Preseason Poll tells you which college football programs are built to win on the field. AIREDEX asked a different question: which of these same programs are built to win in the AI era? The results are not what the scoreboard would predict.

Across the 25 programs in this cohort, AIREDEX scores range from 9.5 at the top down to 5.5 at the bottom. That four-point spread is the story. In a field where any 9.0 is a strong result and anything below 6.0 represents a meaningful gap, the AP Top 25 turns out to be a deeply divided group when it comes to AI readiness.

Utah and Michigan share the top position, each scoring 9.5. Both have made large, named, institutional commitments to AI that reach across their campuses rather than sitting inside a single college or lab. Penn State (9.4), USC (9.3), Tennessee (9.2), Notre Dame (9.1), Washington (9.1), and Texas (9.1) form the rest of the leading group. Eight of the 25 programs scored 9.0 or above. Among major research universities competing at this level, that cluster represents something real: institutions that have moved from AI curiosity to AI infrastructure.

Georgia (8.6), Ohio State (8.6), Texas A&M (8.5), and LSU (8.3) anchor the next tier. These are programs with strong fundamentals and meaningful AI investment, operating without quite the same depth of cross-campus deployment as the top group. Indiana (8.2) and Iowa (8.1) round out a solid middle band, both public Big Ten schools that have built more than most people outside the Midwest would expect.

Then the cohort breaks. Houston (6.7), Oregon (6.5), and SMU (6.2) sit below the group average, followed by Mississippi (5.9), BYU (5.7), and Texas Tech (5.5). The gap between Utah at the top and Texas Tech at the bottom is not marginal. It represents a fundamentally different institutional posture toward AI at the precise moment when posture is starting to matter for students entering the workforce.

The conference breakdown is worth examining. The Big Ten is the strongest conference in this cohort by far, placing multiple schools in the top ten and none in the bottom five. The SEC is divided: Tennessee, Georgia, Texas A&M, and LSU score well; Alabama (7.5), Missouri (7.8), and Mississippi (5.9) are more middling to low. The Big 12 and ACC are represented across the full range.

Texas is a special case. Three programs from the same state appear in this cohort. Texas (9.1) and Texas A&M (8.5) are credible AI leaders on any national comparison. Houston (6.7) and Texas Tech (5.5), both also from Texas, tell a different story. Size and research classification explain some of the gap, but not all of it.

BYU deserves a mention not because its score is the lowest in the cohort, but because the gap reflects something specific. Among smaller private universities with strong undergraduate programs, AI adoption tends to follow institutional culture more than resources. BYU has the resources. The investment footprint simply has not materialized at the same scale as peers in this group.

Notre Dame (9.1) is the most notable private school in the top tier. Its $50.8 million Lilly Endowment grant for AI ethics and its campus-wide tool rollout put it ahead of several flagship publics with far larger budgets. That result is a reminder that capital commitments and institutional will tend to matter more than enrollment or endowment size when it comes to AI readiness.

AIREDEX scores measure what institutions have built, announced, and deployed as of the scoring date. They do not measure what any school intends to do. For the programs at the bottom of this cohort, the question is whether the investments are already in motion or still on a whiteboard. Students choosing among these programs today are making that bet whether they know it or not.