Preseason CBS Sports 138 puts Ohio State narrowly over Oregon, with SEC teams climbing

The 2026 college football season’s first major ranking exercise has arrived, and CBS Sports’ preseason CBS 138 has Ohio State in the top spot, narrowly ahead of Oregon. CBS frames the CBS 138 as its comprehensive, every-team view across FBS, a list designed to be deeper than the smaller top-16 or top-25 formats that appear elsewhere during the buildup to kickoff.

At the center of Ohio State’s placement are returning impact players CBS points to by name: Jeremiah Smith and Julian Sayin. CBS describes the Buckeyes’ edge as coming from those returnees, suggesting it expects Ohio State’s talent baseline to be strong enough to hold up against a heavyweight West Coast opponent in Oregon. The ranking also indicates that Ohio State’s offseason work and continuity are translating into early-season expectations rather than being treated as a rebuild.

CBS’ methodology, at least as it’s described in the preseason preview, emphasizes a wide scope. The CBS 138 is said to include every FBS team and to have grown by two this year, reflecting conference membership changes that bring North Dakota State and Sacramento State into the ranking pool. That matters because it means preseason debates are framed across a larger field, even before Week 1 outcomes start sorting out which teams are poised to separate themselves from the pack.

While Ohio State and Oregon occupy the top two spots, the most notable ripple is inside the SEC. CBS’ preseason preview highlights that several SEC programs “shoot up” in the ranking, positioning the conference as a group that believes it has more momentum than it typically gets in early-season projections. In practical terms, that raises the early stakes for SEC nonconference slates and cross-division games, because a higher preseason ceiling can quickly turn into a harder-to-survive margin for error.

The CBS 138 ranking also sets up a storyline about how teams handle expectations. When a preseason list is built to include the full FBS landscape, the gap between teams can be interpreted as a forecast of consistency: which programs are viewed as steady contenders and which are viewed as more likely to fade as the season plays out. Ohio State starting at No. 1 implies the Buckeyes are viewed as the safest bet to remain near the front of the national conversation, while Oregon’s position as the runner-up indicates CBS sees them as the leading challenger.

For fans tracking the preseason hierarchy, the main question now is how these projections translate once actual scheduling and matchups begin to constrain the field. CBS’ top-two verdict does not replace conference play, but it provides a baseline for what the national ranking conversation is likely to demand. Watch whether SEC teams that CBS expects to jump upward can sustain that profile in September and October, because early games against nonconference opponents and within the league often determine how quickly preseason confidence becomes playoff credibility.