The first NCAA college football coaches poll is released for the 2020 season with all the usual suspects loaded into the top five.
Clemson on Top in Coaches Poll, SEC Teams Well Represented
For the second year in a row, the Clemson Tigers check as the top-ranked team in USA Today’s college football coaches poll. Coached by Dabo Swinney and led by quarterback Trevor Lawrence, Clemson made it to last year’s National Championship game but were defeated by LSU.
Rounding out the top five is Ohio State at No. 2, Alabama comes in at No. 3, Georgia checks in at four and the defending National Champions LSU Tigers are ranked fifth. That’s three teams from the SEC in the top five, one from the ACC and one from the Big Ten.
As Sports Illustrated reported earlier in the week, three of the five power conferences decided to remove out of conference games from their schedule in 2020 with only the Big 12 and ACC having one out of conference game. The SEC, Pac-12, Big 12, Big Ten, and ACC have all pushed back their regular-season start date to mid-to-late September.
Daily Coronavirus and Business Update
There are over 18.8 million cases of the virus worldwide, with over 708,000 deaths. The U.S. has 4.8 million cases with over 158,000 deaths. According to the COVID-19 Tracking Project, there were 52,265 new cases reported Wednesday. 681,537 new tests were reported. 1,403 deaths were reported yesterday.
The Labor Department said that 1.186 million Americans filed first-time jobless claims for the week ended Aug. 1, down from a revised 1.434 million claims the week earlier, as U.S. employers stepped back up their efforts to reopen and rehire, despite renewed virus flare-ups in various states and cities. Economists polled by FactSet had been expecting 1.3 million claims up to last Saturday. Initial claims for jobless benefits have held roughly steady at more than 1.4 million a week since late June, according to the Labor Department. In comparison, that’s far below the 6.5 million claims recorded in the first dark days of the pandemic but still well above the highest on record before this year, which was 695,000 in 1982.
The largest increases in initial claims for the week were in Virginia (+5,020), Nevada (+2,842), Missouri (+2,606), Indiana (+2,218), and New Jersey (+2,141), while the largest decreases were in California (-44,941), Georgia (-37,329), Florida (-17,514), Louisiana (-13,568), and Texas (-11,104).
TheStreet's Katherine Ross contributed to this report.