In case you need a little college football preview fix ahead of Ohio State kicking things off for the 2025 season, the preseason college football preview magazines are starting to hit the shelves and online. One I’ve enjoyed picking up over the years is Athlon Sports preview magazine. I’ve been reading it for years and I plan to go in-depth on its contents again this season.

If you are like me, the first thing you head for in any preview article or magazine is where the Buckeyes are in the national rankings previews, and that’s exactly where I went with this year’s Athlon preview magazine. You had to think that Ohio State would be fairly high in the rankings, being the defending College Football Playoff national champions and all, and that’s exactly what we found inside the contents of Athlon’s ranking.

In fact, Athlon has Ohio State as the No. 3 team in the country, behind only Texas at No. 1 and Penn State at No. 2. That should set up some pretty monumental contests on the schedule this year because Ohio State opens up with Texas in the ‘Shoe and also hosts the Nittany Lions later in the year.

Athlon 2025 College Football Preview is out. An early Merry Christmas!….#teamsidelinepic.twitter.com/IooMBEHOky

— Brent Beaird (@brentbeaird) June 3, 2025

Rounding out the top ten for Athlon behind OSU is Georgia (4), Clemson (5), Notre Dame (6), LSU (7), Alabama (8), Oregon (9), and Miami (FL) (10). That’s the usual suspects I guess you would expect, and if we look a little further down the preseason rankings, we see Michigan sitting there at No. 15.

We’ll see how close this preseason ranking is when things get rolling starting in Week 1 on Aug. 30.

This article originally appeared on Buckeyes Wire: Athlon College Football Preview is out. Where is Ohio State ranked?