Big Ten preseason poll makes Penn State’s biggest CFP advantage impossible to ignore

On Tuesday, the Big Ten will converge on Chicago for its annual Media Days, but on Monday, another conference tradition kicked off the week as Cleveland.com released its annual preseason Big Ten Media poll. The site has done a preseason poll since 2011, and rather than a traditional power ranking, it projects the order of finish. 

In the 2025 edition of the Cleveland.com poll, Penn State claimed the top spot with 11 first-place votes, narrowly edging out Ohio State with 10. We all know how that worked out for the Nittany Lions, finishing 6-6 after James Franklin was fired midway through the year. Indiana, the eventual national champions, finished No. 6 and did not receive a single first-place vote. 

This year’s poll gave the nod to Ohio State, receiving 15 votes to reclaim the Big Ten Championship for the first time since 2020. Oregon finished second, and Indiana, still doubted despite winning it all in January, finished third. 

Penn State, in Year 1 under Matt Campbell, does not carry the same level of hype it did into the 2025 campaign. The Nittany Lions slotted in at No. 6. While that may appear to be a disappointment, the poll highlights Penn State’s biggest advantage in its path to get back to the College Football Playoff. 

Penn State avoids Big Ten’s presumptive top-3 teams in 2026

No matter the schedule, Penn State should never finish as a six-win team. That’s an unacceptable low-water mark for a program that Franklin helped to resurrect into a national contender. And those six losses included upsets at the hands of UCLA and Northwestern. Still, though, Penn State faced a gauntlet in Big Ten play last year. 

The Nittany Lions opened conference play hosting Oregon, when everything started to fall apart. Then, later in the year, Penn State faced Ohio State and Indiana in back-to-back weeks. Those were the conference’s three representatives in the CFP, and Indiana and Oregon matched up in the CFP semifinal. 

This year, almost no matter how you slice it, Penn State got a gift of a schedule. The only top-five teams from this poll that Penn State plays are No. 4 USC and No. 5 Michigan, and the Trojans come to Happy Valley for a game that is almost assuredly going to get the White Out treatment. 

Penn State also faces Purdue, Rutgers, Maryland, and Northwestern, four of the bottom five teams according to Cleveland.com’s poll. Along with a soft three-game non-conference slate against Marshall, Temple, and Buffalo, 10-2 is a reasonable expectation for Campbell’s inaugural quest through the Big Ten. 

With bloated 18-team conferences, there are going to be vast schedule imbalances. Unlike the SEC, which has given each of its programs three annual opponents, the Big Ten is on a wider rotation, though it protects its most important rivalry matchups. 

That protection does not extend to the Penn State/Ohio State head-to-head, and likely wouldn’t even with an SEC-like model because it would be unfair for Ohio State to be forced to play Penn State and Michigan every year. That means, every once in a while, Penn State will get a lucky break like this on the schedule, so it must be ready to take advantage. 

The preseason poll has Penn State finishing behind USC and Michigan, so it seems to expect a loss for the Nittany Lions in both of those games. 10-2 likely wouldn’t get Penn State into the CFP without a signature win, but it could result in better than a sixth-place finish with USC and Michigan both drawing the Indiana, Oregon, Ohio State triumvirate this year.

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