Mountain West Scraps Preseason Football Poll Amid Realignment Chaos

The Mountain West Conference will not release a preseason football poll this season, a decision the league attributed directly to conference realignment. The move affects UNM football and every other program still competing under the Mountain West banner heading into the 2025 season.

The Albuquerque Journal first reported the development as part of a broader UNM football notes package. The conference offered "conference realignment" as the official explanation for scrapping the poll, a tradition that typically gives fans and analysts an early look at how media and coaches expect the season to shake out.

Why the Preseason Poll Was Cancelled

Preseason polls in college football conferences are usually conducted among media members or coaches who vote on projected order of finish before a single game is played. The Mountain West has run such polls in past seasons, giving programs like UNM a benchmark heading into fall camp.

This year, however, the landscape across the Mountain West is anything but settled. Conference realignment has reshaped the league's membership in recent cycles, with programs departing for other conferences and questions remaining about the long-term stability of the Mountain West itself. With rosters of voters and even the list of competing teams in flux, the conference opted to skip the poll entirely rather than produce a ranking that could quickly become outdated or misleading.

It is a practical, if unusual, call. A preseason poll carries little weight on its own, but it signals confidence in a league's structure. Cancelling it signals the opposite.

What This Means for UNM Football

For the New Mexico Lobos, the absence of a preseason poll is a footnote heading into what the program hopes will be a competitive season. UNM will still open its schedule and compete for a Mountain West title regardless of whether a projected standings list exists in August.

That said, the broader instability in the conference is real context for the Lobos program. UNM has spent years as a mid-tier Mountain West program trying to build consistency. Realignment pressures that have pulled other schools away from the conference create uncertainty about future scheduling, bowl tie-ins, and television revenue, all of which matter to programs operating on tighter athletic budgets.

Coach Bronco Mendenhall's rebuild at UNM is ongoing, and the team heads into the season without the external measuring stick a preseason poll would normally provide. For a program trying to prove it belongs among the league's better teams, that benchmark, however informal, can carry motivational weight in a locker room.

A League in Transition

The Mountain West's decision to cancel the preseason poll underscores just how unsettled college football's mid-major landscape remains. Realignment that accelerated when the Pac-12 effectively collapsed has sent ripple effects through conferences at every level. The Mountain West lost several programs and has been working to stabilize its footprint ever since.

Skipping an annual poll is a small administrative decision, but it reflects a conference still sorting out its own identity heading into a new season. For fans of UNM football and Mountain West programs across the region, the preseason buzz will simply have to come from camp reports and scrimmage observations rather than an official projected order of finish.

The regular season remains the only poll that counts.