LSU football earns surprising spot in way too early top 25 rankings

Now that the 2025 college football season has finally wrapped up, sports media has already begun looking to next year. USA Today’s Erick Smith and Paul Myerberg published their “Too Early” top 25 ranking for the 2026 college football season on Monday, and LSU football earned a spot, ranking 15th.

This is a somewhat surprising ranking for several reasons. First, it’s hard to bank on the Tigers being considered that caliber of team next season. 2025 highlighted serious depth issues on the roster, primarily caused by a poor recruiting job by the team’s former head coach, Brian Kelly. Youth and depth are key predictors of a team’s success from year to year, and LSU was clearly lacking last year -- making it hard to get hopes up this early into the offseason.

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On the other hand, LSU retained several of its star players during the transfer portal window and signed several names of note, with the Tigers’ new starting quarterback, Sam Leavitt, at the top of that list. Leavitt was the top-ranked quarterback available this offseason and should hopefully help the Kiffin era at LSU get off to a hot start. Kiffin also did a great job of putting the wide receiver room together, giving Leavitt plenty of dangerous targets for 2026.

Defensive coordinator Blake Baker was also retained, maintaining continuity -- and hopefully the level of excellence the defense achieved last season.

In short, there’s a clear argument that LSU should be lower on the list. It’s a brand-new team with a brand-new offensive staff. At the same time, however, there’s also reason to believe this ranking underestimates the Tigers, that they should be ranked above the likes of Michigan, BYU and USC. Unfortunately, it will be a long wait to see which turns out to be correct -- over seven months, to be exact.

Here's what USA TODAY wrote about the Tigers:

"It wasn’t the smoothest journey, but the Tigers eventually secured their quarterback by adding Sam Leavitt to give Lane Kiffin the key piece to build his offense around in his first season. There are expectedly a lot of other changes with upwards of 30 arrivals in the transfer portal, notably WRs Jayce Brown (Kansas State) and Tre Brown (Old Dominion). Two on defense worth watching are DL Stephiylan Green (Clemson) and DB Ty Benefield (Boise State), who will join holdover LB Whit Weeks after his decision to return after an injury-marred season. One big challenge early in Kiffin’s tenure is a schedule which features an enticing lineup of visits from Clemson, Texas, Alabama and Texas A&M."

This article originally appeared on LSU Wire: LSU football earns surprising spot in way too early top 25 rankings