College football resume rankings: Texas on top as UCLA, Duke, Tulsa stand out early in 2026 season — SkimNews
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- Texas leads the Week 2 college football resume rankings with a score of 0.90 — nearly a full win above what the average No. 25-ranked team would be expected to have against its schedule to this point.
- UCLA ranks in the top 10 of resume scores after beating Cal and San Diego State, two top-60 opponents, despite not appearing in the AP Top 25, Tom Fornelli's power ratings, or Brandon Marcello's power rankings.
- Duke and Tulsa also crack the top 10 of resume scores without showing up elsewhere: Duke owns a road win over a top-50 Illinois team, while Tulsa knocked off a top-40 Oklahoma State.
- Ohio State is absent from the top 15 but effectively starts from scratch at a cumulative -0.01, losing just -0.02 for its road loss to No. 1 Texas because an average No. 25 team would be expected to win that matchup only about 2% of the time.
- The resume ranking strips out efficiency, margin, talent level, and brand bias, scoring every game between -1 and 1 based solely on result, location, and where the opponent sits in the CBS Sports 138 — a method modeled on college basketball's Wins Above Bubble (WAB).
Why it matters: The resume-based methodology rewards UCLA, Duke, and Tulsa for beating quality opponents while leaving them off every other major ballot, exposing how brand and preseason expectations distort conventional rankings. Ohio State's near-zero cumulative score also shows that early-season losses to elite road opponents carry almost no penalty under this system, since an average top-25 team would only win at No. 1 Texas roughly 2% of the time.
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