Josh Pate opened his preseason JP Poll not with a name, but with a distance. The gap between the number one team in the country and the number ten team, according to the model he runs the show around, is a little over a touchdown. That is the smallest that spread has been in recent memory, and Pate built his entire argument around what that number means for the sport heading into 2026.

The JP Poll is not a ranking. Pate has to say that every year because every year someone forgets it. It is a power rating, meaning it does not care who should be ranked where — it only answers one question: if these two teams played today on a neutral field, who gets favored, and by how much. As “These are not FanDuel's numbers. These are the models numbers. In fact, FanDuel disagrees with the model on quite a few of these teams. To take it a step further, I disagree with the model on a few of these teams.” Pate put it, the fight this year isn't fans versus Pate. It's Pate and the audience versus a laptop that, in his words, works in mysterious ways.

That context matters because the number that actually drove this episode wasn't at the top of the poll. It was six points. “The gap between 22 and 44 is six points.” Six points separating a team ranked in the 20s from one sitting outside the top 40 altogether. That is the entire spread of the sport's middle class packed into less real estate than a single blown coverage costs a defense.

The case: parity isn't a vibe, it's a spreadsheet

Pate's central claim landed when he got to the top five. Ohio State sits number one. Indiana sits number five. Those two teams play each other this season, in Bloomington, and the model's gap between them is about three and a half points — meaning if the game were today, Ohio State would be roughly a one-and-a-half-point favorite on the road according to FanDuel's own number.

That is not a typo and it is not the model being generous to Indiana. It's the shape of the entire sport now, and Pate said so directly: “the era of the Super Team is long gone. the era of one, two, massive gap, number three, another massive gap, four through 10, that's gone.”

The old hierarchy — a clear one and two, a manageable gap, then a scrum for the rest of the top ten — doesn't exist in these numbers. Pate counted somewhere around thirteen or fourteen teams that the model believes have a real shot, and that number is the actual story of the preseason, more than any single ranking slot.

The model backed that claim up in stranger corners of the poll too. Ole Miss sits eighth, LSU ninth, and Pate flagged that the model treats that gap — three points — as bigger than it looks, big enough to put Ole Miss in what he called tier one while LSU starts the tier below it. “The model says Miss should be in tier one because there is a three-point gap between Miss and LSU.” In a normal year, that's a rounding error. In a year where the twelfth-ranked team and the thirty-second-ranked team are separated by less than a touchdown, three points is a canyon.

The honest complication

Here's where Pate's own credibility check comes in, and to his credit, he built it into the show himself rather than waiting for the comment section. The model that's arguing for historic parity is the same model Pate accused of running actively hostile toward Oklahoma. “It is well documented that this model is in the tank for Texas. So much so that it is anti- Oklahoma. I think it's very safe to say that this model is got some anti-sooner black magic to it.” If the machine has a documented, specific bias against one program, that's a real problem for trusting its verdict on the shape of the entire sport. A model that's wrong about Oklahoma by a meaningful margin is a model whose top-ten compression claim deserves a raised eyebrow, not a rubber stamp.

There's also the bottom of the poll, which quietly argues against the parity thesis rather than for it. “For the record, there will not be a G6 team in the top 25. The reason there are at least 25 teams in the country that would be favored against the highest rated G6 team.” Boise State, the model's best Group of Six team, checks in at 45. That's not parity. That's a hard, familiar ceiling that hasn't moved in years, sitting right below all this talk of a flattened top ten.

The close

Pate isn't asking anyone to marry this model. He spent half the show arguing with it — calling it out on Illinois, on Clemson, on Oklahoma — and admitted he's been burned before doubting it and had to come back around. But the number he can't talk himself out of is the one connecting Ohio State to Indiana: three and a half points separating the top team in the country from the fifth, in a game that's actually on the schedule. That's not preseason filler. That's a receipt college football will cash in Bloomington this fall.

Watch the full breakdown at the timestamps above, then go check where your team landed in the complete 25-to-1 rundown — because somewhere in that middle third, six points is doing a lot more arguing than any ranking number ever could.