NEW ORLEANS – Like nearly all leagues, the Sun Belt Conference polls its coaches prior to each season and compiles a preseason ranking for teams in the league, forecasting how the conference race will play out.
For the coaches, even that task has become much more difficult with the advent of the transfer portal.
“The preseason polls, to figure out where everybody’s at, it’s hard,” said Coastal Carolina third-year head coach Tim Beck, one of the seven Sun Belt East Division coaches who were featured Wednesday at Sun Belt Football Media Days. “Nobody knows for sure what’s really going to take place until you get out there and you start practicing and teams start playing.”
Coastal Carolina was picked to finish fourth in the East Division Preseason Poll, behind James Madison, Georgia Southern and App State. Old Dominion was one more spot behind, despite head coach Ricky Rahne’s prediction that his Monarchs will be much improved, and Rahne is even less a fan of the preseason picks.
“In my opinion, the preseason polls are the silliest thing that we do in all of college sports,” he said. “I especially think they’re silly now because no one knows the players, no one knows his team, and no one knows how they’re going to work together.”
In the past, teams that had the most success in the preceding year were always at or near the top of the preseason polls. That’s not the case anymore, and Marshall’s Thundering Herd is a perfect example.
The Thundering Herd rolled to six-straight wins at the end of the 2024 regular season—and had a dominating 31-3 win over Louisiana in the Sun Belt Football Championship Game—but Marshall is picked sixth in the Sun Belt East Division in this year’s preseason ledger, after a bevy of transfers followed head coach Charles Huff to Southern Miss. First-year head coach Tony Gibson has a huge rebuilding job with 72 new players on his Thundering Herd roster—54 transfers and 18 high school recruits.
“We hope it stops there,” Gibson said of the big newcomer numbers. “But we will be at 105 starting camp, and we’re excited about how our team has worked and how our guys have bought into our culture. They understand how special Marshall is and what we play for.”
The injury-plagued Louisiana team that lost to Marshall in the title game appears ready to make another title run. The Ragin’ Cajuns were picked to win the Sun Belt West Division by a solid margin because of a solid returnee corps.
The Ragin’ Cajuns also had the advantage of depth, and the ability to elevate players already in the program into significant roles. That limited their need for deep dives into the transfer portal.
“We’ll take transfers where they’re needed,” said fourth-year Louisiana coach Michael Desormeaux, who has taken Louisiana to three-straight bowl games. “But I’m proud that we’ve been able to keep our roster together over the course of the last three years. We think that gives us an opportunity for success, but we know we’re not there yet. We still have more work to do.”
Texas State’s Bobcats were a solid second-place selection in the poll despite significant graduation and transfer losses, with 50 lettermen gone from last year’s 8-5 team that won the SERVPRO First Responder Bowl. The Bobcats are in their final year of Sun Belt competition with an impending move to the Pac-12 Conference in 2026-27.
“With everything going on with conference realignment, we’re focused on the Sun Belt and focused on competing here,” said third-year head coach GJ Kinne. “Our seniors are definitely focused on the Sun Belt. We’ll let our president and our athletic director worry about all that other stuff. We’ve accomplished a bunch of really good things the last two years, back-to-back bowl victories and a lot of firsts, but the conference championship is what we want to accomplish.”
If the Bobcats can do that, they’ll do it without a single player named to either the Preseason All-Sun Belt First or Second Teams, likely because of the large number of new faces.
“We don’t control that,” Kinne said. “All I know is that we had some really good players over the last two years, and I think we have some really good players this year.”
James Madison was the runaway favorite in the Sun Belt East Division Preseason Poll, getting 11 of the 14 first-place votes and 94 points overall, after coming within a double-overtime loss to Marshall in the regular-season finale of winning the East a year ago.
“We had a nice year, and we did some things well, obviously to end with the first-ever bowl game win, that’s something we’re honored by,” said second-year head coach Bob Chesney. “But there are a lot of games in there that we left on the table and things we weren’t excited about, but from that failure should come a lesson.”
Chesney had a late start in his first season last year and had more than 60 new players during last year’s 9-4 season. There are 54 newcomers again this year.
“A lot of changes have happened in the last year, and we had a lot that we had to learn in a very quick period of time,” he said. “But I’m excited about how quickly all our guys bought in. We don’t have that many true returning starters, but a lot of guys rotated in last year and they’ve let us get a jump start on this season.”
Georgia Southern was picked second in the East, and fourth-year head coach Clay Helton said his team is easily the most experienced since he arrived.
“I look around the locker room and I see third- and fourth-year guys everywhere,” he said. “We’ve had 81 high school signees in the last three years and 59 of them have been from the state of Georgia. Those guys understand the expectations. We know how close we were last year, being one play away from playing in the championship game, and our guys have carried that over. They have a chip on their shoulder, and I think hungry teams play better.”