How often do ranked college football teams lose to unranked teams?

Unranked FBS teams won 19.7% of their games against AP Top 25 teams in 2025, about one in five. The share has ranged from 4.5% in 1998 to 25.9% in 2007, and has usually been higher since 2000 than in the 1990s. A team counts as ranked if it was in the AP poll that stood before the game; bowl games count, and games against lower-division (FCS) teams don't. The chart starts in 1989, when the AP poll began ranking 25 teams every week.

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Key facts

Measure: Games an unranked team won against an AP Top 25 team (%). Written from the data below.

  • The latest figure, for 2025, is 19.7%.
  • That is up 3.1 percentage points from 16.6% in 1989.
  • The highest was 25.9% in 2007.
  • The lowest was 4.5% in 1998.

Source and date

Source
CollegeFootballData.com, college football games and AP Top 25 polls
License
CollegeFootballData.com terms of use (factual data, credited to CollegeFootballData.com)
Data as of
Published

Citation

Chartly. “How often do ranked college football teams lose to unranked teams?” Chart. Data: CollegeFootballData.com, college football games and AP Top 25 polls, https://collegefootballdata.com/ (data as of January 20, 2026). https://chart.ly/charts/college-football-ranked-teams-upset (accessed October 15, 2026).

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The data

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The file has the numbers in this table, with the source, license and date. Please credit the source and Chartly.

Season Games an unranked team won against an AP Top 25 team (%)
1989 16.6
1990 8
1991 12.8
1992 17.7
1993 14
1994 19.6
1995 16.9
1996 13.9
1997 18.3
1998 4.5
1999 20.7
2000 18.5
2001 20.1
2002 21.2
2003 20.6
2004 15.6
2005 22.8
2006 13.6
2007 25.9
2008 25.1
2009 20.9
2010 16.2
2011 16.8
2012 17.4
2013 15.5
2014 16.3
2015 18.1
2016 24.5
2017 16.5
2018 23.8
2019 17.5
2020 22.3
2021 22.4
2022 22.8
2023 16.4
2024 19.2
2025 19.7

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