Friday Night Drive’s 2023 Preseason Power Rankings: Let the games begin

For a person who likes data, formulating a preseason poll is only a little bit short of a nightmare.

There’s way too many unknown variables, a series of riddles that won’t be solved for awhile, if ever.

So, the exercise is often a combination of relying on past success stories and teams that for whatever reason have the potential to breakthrough.

Those identifiers are tricky. There’s a whole bunch of impact players – many of which even us who follow high school football haven’t even heard of.

We will soon. We just haven’t yet.

There’s a lot to learn and this coming weekend will answer some of those questions, but everything is completely hypothetical at this point.

The easiest course of action here is to rely on past success. It isn’t a fool-proof process, but it is as good a place as any to start. Power programs didn’t get to be power programs by having a rollercoaster pattern of year-to-year win totals.

Sometimes those pedigreed programs return a bunch of starters, other times, not so much. But history often shows teams with extreme rates of success seem to know how to reload rather than rebuild.

That’s why this poll, despite a lot of roster turnover in some cases, shows many of the same names that were on this list at the close of 2022.

Did I pick the right ones? Possibly.

But I’m waiting to see how wrong I am. And believe it or not, that may be what I enjoy the most in this process.

There’s no chance the 25 teams listed below will be the same 25 teams at the end of the season. Who is missing? How high will those teams climb?

On Thursday, we’ll start to find out.

Here are the preseason Friday Night Drive Power Rankings: