Texas ranks No. 14 in preseason AP Top 25

The annual tradition of the preseason AP Top 25 poll came out on Monday and the Texas Longhorns slotted as the No. 14 team on on the list, just behind the Texas A&M Aggies.

It’s the fourth time in four seasons under head coach Tom Herman that the Longhorns will start the season in the rankings. Last year, the AP voters picked Texas as the No. 10 team nationally before the program stumbled to an 8-5 record that did include an impressive dismantling of one-time College Football Playoff contender Utah in the Alamo Bowl.

Since then, normalcy vacated the premises, resulting in an AP Poll that still includes programs that won’t play college football this fall — Ohio State sits at No. 2, with Penn State at No. 2 and Oregon at No. 9.

That will change when the season starts, assuming that’s possible, leading to a poll that will draw from the significantly-reduced pool of teams still playing in another sign of how strange things are in the sports world now, too.