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Georgia’s 45-17 win over Arkansas wasn’t much of a football game, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of filling space. Georgia showed up in Fayetteville, realized fairly quickly that Arkansas wasn’t going to provide much resistance and essentially treated the game like a particularly well-attended Saturday practice. At one point, the Bulldogs’ offensive and defensive linemen were apparently using television timeouts to get extra work in because the actual game wasn’t providing enough of it. I cannot think of many more depressing ways to describe the state of a football program than the other team decided to squeeze in some practice reps during commercials.

The empty seats probably said more about Arkansas than anything that happened between the lines. Fayetteville is supposed to be one of those places where college football consumes the weekend, so watching large portions of the stadium sit empty for an SEC game against Georgia should concern everyone involved. Fans didn’t suddenly stop caring about Arkansas football. If anything, they’re staying home because they care enough to be completely exhausted by what it has become.

I don’t think most of that anger is directed at Ryan Silverfield, either. Sure, there are probably a few people who decided they were out on him by halftime Saturday because college football fans are college football fans, and somebody somewhere has probably already identified the perfect replacement on a message board. Most people understand Silverfield inherited this mess. He has been in Fayetteville for a matter of months; the frustration has been building for closer to 15 years.

Arkansas has hired new coaches before, and every change comes with another invitation to believe the Razorbacks have finally figured it out. Sometimes they even provide enough evidence to make that belief feel reasonable for a while before everyone eventually ends up having the same conversation with a different name occupying the office. There are only so many times you can sell people a fresh start before they begin wondering why the starting point never seems to change.

And Arkansas should not be this hopeless. Nobody is asking the Razorbacks to become Georgia, because asking basically anybody to become Georgia is a good way to spend the next decade miserable. But this is a program with a fan base that desperately wants to support it, located in a state where finding wealthy companies is not exactly an elaborate scavenger hunt. Arkansas doesn’t need to become a permanent national championship contender for people to feel good about the direction of the program. It just needs to stop making competence feel like some grand ambition.

That responsibility extends well beyond Silverfield. Arkansas has changed the person wearing the headset enough times to know that another coaching search cannot be the answer to every problem, particularly when so many of the same problems seem to survive each change. Eventually, the people making the hires and deciding how the program operates have to answer for why the results keep looking so familiar.

The folks are pissed off — excuse my language — and they have every right to be. They’ve heard about plans before and waited through rebuilds that eventually led to another rebuild. Empty seats against Georgia aren’t evidence that Arkansas fans have stopped caring. They’re evidence that asking them to keep proving how much they care while giving them so little in return has finally gotten old.

Something has to change, and for once, Arkansas might want to start somewhere other than the head coach’s office.

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There was a moment late Saturday night, with LSU desperately trying to erase an eight-point deficit and the entire state of Mississippi seemingly screaming at Lane Kiffin through their television screens, when Sam Leavitt’s pass was deflected and floated into the end zone. Jaylon Braxton was waiting there for it, and the second the Ole Miss defensive back secured the interception, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium released approximately nine months of pent-up emotion all at once.

Excuse me for my previous mistake. That wasn’t just “a moment.” It was the moment.

Ole Miss had waited for this from basically the second Kiffin decided he was leaving for LSU. There were plenty of reasons for Rebels fans to be angry about the departure itself, but the manner in which everything unfolded only made the breakup worse. Kiffin had built Ole Miss into something it had spent years trying to become, gotten the Rebels to the doorstep of genuine national championship contention and then decided the grass might be greener a few hours down the road in Baton Rouge. Ole Miss was left behind like the scorned lover in a relationship that had seemed to be going rather well right up until one person abruptly announced they were moving out.

Then the ex came back to town, and there was no attempt from Oxford to pretend everything was fine. Every camera shot of Kiffin standing on the opposing sideline felt a little surreal because this was his stadium until very recently, filled with people who used to celebrate everything he did and now wanted nothing more than to watch him fail. Ole Miss played like a team that understood exactly what the night meant, building a 24-7 halftime lead before LSU eventually recovered and tied the game at 24. For a few uncomfortable minutes, the possibility existed that Kiffin might actually walk back into Oxford and steal the ending everyone there had spent months imagining.

Trinidad Chambliss made sure he didn’t. Ole Miss regained the lead late, converted the two-point attempt to make it 32-24 and eventually watched Braxton intercept LSU’s final attempt to keep the game alive. Kiffin had returned to the place where he built his reputation into something considerably larger, faced the people he left behind and walked back out with his first loss as LSU’s coach.

Saturday also brought me back to the question I had when Kiffin left in the first place: Was LSU really worth giving all of this up?

College football has changed enough that I’m not sure those old assumptions still apply. NIL and the transfer portal have compressed the distance between programs that used to occupy entirely different levels of the sport, and Ole Miss is one of the clearest examples of what that new world looks like. Kiffin didn’t leave a program that had reached its ceiling and needed a miracle to go any further. He left one that, at the time of his departure, was about to make the College Football Playoff and had put itself in position to chase the same national championship he presumably went to LSU to pursue.

Baton Rouge also isn’t exactly famous for giving coaches unlimited time to figure things out, which only adds to the gamble of leaving a program where Kiffin had already built almost everything he needed. We won’t know whether he made the right decision for several years, and Saturday certainly didn’t settle the larger question.

It did give Ole Miss the answer it wanted for one night. The ex came back to town, and the scorned lover got its revenge.

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I was on the verge of turning off Texas-Ohio State at the beginning of the fourth quarter. The Buckeyes were up 23-3, Texas hadn’t shown much of anything offensively and I had already started mentally moving on to whatever game was next. There was little reason to believe the Longhorns were about to make things interesting, much less come all the way back and win the thing. Perhaps that was a bit of an overreaction.

Arch Manning spent the next 15 minutes showing exactly why Texas needs to stop being so careful with him. Steve Sarkisian can baby his quarterback all he wants, and I understand the thought process behind doing so when Manning is still relatively imperfect, but we’re reaching the point where the protection is becoming part of the problem. This is one of the most talented quarterbacks in college football surrounded by a roster loaded with players capable of making his life easier. Eventually you have to trust all of that talent and see what happens.

Texas didn’t really have another choice by the time the fourth quarter arrived. Being down 20 tends to simplify the decision-making process, so the Longhorns opened things up and Manning responded by looking like a completely different quarterback. He started pushing the ball downfield and suddenly Texas had an offense capable of putting Ohio State on its heels. It wasn’t particularly complicated. They just finally let Arch go to town.

That has to be the blueprint from here. Manning is going to make mistakes if Texas gives him more freedom, and there will inevitably be a Saturday where one of those mistakes costs the Longhorns dearly. I’d still rather take my chances with that version than spend three quarters trying to steer him toward the perfect performance. Choosing to unleash a quarterback this talented should be easier than deciding whether to eat dessert before dinner. The answer is always yes.

Ohio State is going to have a much less enjoyable time revisiting the fourth quarter because there were so many moments where the Buckeyes could’ve ended this thing. Julian Sayin missed what would’ve been a touchdown to McCuin. Texas somehow converted a fourth-and-9 during the comeback, and Ohio State later missed a field goal that would’ve put the Buckeyes up two scores again. Change any one of those moments and we’re probably spending Monday talking about an impressive road win instead of Ryan Day overseeing a collapse.

I don’t think this can be filed away solely as Texas producing a great comeback. It absolutely was one, and the Longhorns deserve credit for refusing to die when the game appeared finished, but Ohio State also let them keep hanging around long enough for something ridiculous to happen. Eventually you have to close the door. The Buckeyes never did, and Manning kicked it off the hinges once he realized it was still open.

The state of Oklahoma experienced some whiplash Saturday afternoon. Some welcomed the sudden jump in G’s, while others were … well, those people probably want the world to burn at the moment.

Around the same time that the Oklahoma Sooners were about to fall to the Michigan Wolverines in a game that was about as easy to watch as it is to listen to congressional hearings about the environmental safety of pigeon farms in upstate New York — there’s no way that’s a real thing, right? — the Oklahoma State Cowboys were in the midst of accomplishing something extraordinary. A program that had lost 21 consecutive games against FBS opponents and had just lost to Tulsa — yes, Tulsa! — the week before was suddenly on the verge of taking down No. 6 Oregon, a team that featured what many had called the best defense in the country and entered the season with legitimate national title aspirations.

A track meet ensued, with Oklahoma State piling up 554 yards of offense and completely dismantling Dan Lanning’s supposedly stellar defense. Transfer quarterback Drew Mestemaker, who was a walk-on at North Texas last year before following head coach Eric Morris to Stillwater this past offseason, threw for 317 yards and two touchdowns while adding more than 100 yards and another score on the ground. He outdueled former five-star recruit and prospective first-round draft pick Dante Moore, leading an offense that looked absolutely nothing like the one that had just lost to Tulsa. Everything seemed upside down. Everything was strange. And in the end, the Cowboys finished on top, 39-31.

Flash back a couple of hours to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Oklahoma, a program that used to possess powerful offenses headed by Heisman winners like Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray, has since gone through a complete reimagining. Brent Venables has brought a spectacular defense to Norman, but the fun and potent offensive units that once defined the Sooners have shriveled away.

Many thought that problem was fixed when John Mateer transferred in from Washington State alongside offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle, but a thumb injury in 2025 derailed whatever momentum Mateer and the offense were able to build. Entering 2026, the hope was that a healthy Mateer plus a fresh stable of weapons would finally help deliver OU back toward the promised land.

Folks, it appears that Oklahoma still has a Mateer problem, and this time it’s not because of his thumb.

Oklahoma looked putrid. Horrible. Disgusting. Sure, the defense balled out, but that was somewhat expected against a Michigan side that was lucky — extremely lucky — to come away with a win over Western Michigan one Saturday ago. As that side of the football did its job, Mateer and his offense made moving the football look about as difficult as rocket science, finishing with just 289 yards and 10 points while converting three of 13 third downs.

Then came the backbreaker. With the game tied at 10 and Oklahoma needing its quarterback to make the sort of play that would justify all of the optimism surrounding him entering the season, Mateer instead threw a pick-six. Oklahoma never recovered, and an afternoon that could have served as proof that the Sooners were ready to take another step instead produced the exact same questions that have followed this offense for years.

Meanwhile, roughly 900 miles away, Oklahoma State was apparently playing NCAA Football 14 with the sliders turned all the way down. This is a team that went 1-11 last season, fired the coach who had run the program for two decades and then celebrated its fresh start under Eric Morris by losing to Tulsa. Seven days later, the Cowboys welcomed the No. 6 team in the country — the same Oregon program that beat them 69-3 a year ago — and wrote all the wrongs of the last seven days.

By the end of it, fans were storming the field and tearing down the goalposts while Mestemaker said he couldn’t think of a better moment in his life. Frankly, I’m not sure how you top going from North Texas walk-on to beating No. 6 Oregon while accounting for more than 400 yards of offense, so I’m willing to give him that one.

And then there’s Oklahoma, which entered the day with playoff aspirations, a supposedly fixed offense and a quarterback who was supposed to be one of the best in the country. Now the Sooners are flying home from Ann Arbor after scoring 10 points against a Michigan team that barely survived Western Michigan, and the guy who was supposed to fix everything is going to spend the next week hearing about he’s the real problem that can’t be solved.

What a sport.

There are dozens of teams capable of having good college football seasons in 2026. There are probably 15 or so with a legitimate path to the College Football Playoff, and depending on how loose you want to get with the word “contender,” somewhere between six and 10 could talk themselves into believing a national championship is actually possible.

But there are four teams I keep coming back to: Texas, Texas A&M, Indiana and LSU.

These aren’t necessarily the four best teams in college football, though some or all of them could eventually fit that description depending on how the season unfolds. No, they’re the four squads I believe will have the largest impact on how we experience this season. Texas enters another year with a loaded roster and national championship expectations after failing to reach the playoff in 2025. Texas A&M finally broke through under Mike Elko and now has to prove it wasn’t a one-year excursion toward greatness. Indiana, meanwhile, is attempting to figure out what life looks like after improbably going 16-0 and climbing to the top of the college football mountain.

And then there’s LSU.

The Tigers stumbled through a disappointing 2025 season under Brian Kelly, only to respond by cutting a massive check to get rid of him and then following that up by making one of the wildest coaching hires in recent memory, prying Lane Kiffin away from Ole Miss in the middle of the Rebels’ run to the College Football Playoff. LSU then handed him seemingly every resource imaginable to overhaul the roster, spending heavily in the transfer portal and assembling a team expected to contend immediately.

And because this is LSU, even that apparently wasn’t enough drama. Kiffin’s first game arrives with the Tigers embroiled in the bizarre saga surrounding former professional players returning to college football, adding another layer of noise to an offseason already overflowing with it. The hire, the money, the expectations, the endless controversies — all of it feels so quintessentially LSU that I needed an external opinion on what exactly we’re dealing with here.

So I turned to my friend Zion Trammell, a writer for LSU On SI, to help make sense of Kiffin’s arrival, this completely reconstructed roster and just how good — or how chaotic — the Tigers could be in 2026.

Let’s start with the obvious one: What the heck is LSU going to look like under Lane Kiffin?

Zion: LSU is going to look very different this season. The Tigers spent a lot of money in the transfer portal and completely overhauled the roster, giving Kiffin a team that looks almost nothing like the one that came before it.

Kiffin wasn’t given a grace period, either. LSU expects to win now, and I think the Tigers have the team to win plenty of games right away.

Seth: There are two answers to this question, one centered around the actual football on the field and another focused on all the drama off it. We’ve already seen what life is like in the latter, as the Tigers are embroiled in a controversy of their own making, recruiting players who signed professional contracts in the NFL but won a fifth year of eligibility because, well, the NCAA screwed the pooch again. All anyone can seemingly talk about in the lead-up to Kiffin’s inaugural game against Clemson on Saturday is this whole eligibility saga, and the actual football has been pushed to the side. Expect a lot of that throughout Kiffin’s time in Baton Rouge.

On the field, though, this program — as Zion alluded to above — has the potential to be an absolute gauntlet. If Kiffin keeps up the same level of production he had at Ole Miss, but with LSU’s resources, I can’t even imagine the ceiling. But I just can’t shake the feeling that Kiffin’s extracurriculars will get in the way of everything, just as they have everywhere he’s been.

How much confidence do you have in Sam Leavitt being the quarterback LSU needs him to be?

Zion: There’s plenty of confidence in Leavitt to lead this new-look team. When he’s healthy, his dual-threat ability makes him a fun quarterback to watch and gives Kiffin plenty to work with offensively.

I think it’ll take some time for him to adjust to the tougher defenses he’ll see in the SEC, but I think he’s the right guy to lead the Tigers.

Seth: I’m one of the supreme Sam Leavitt believers. There was a moment midway through Arizona State’s 2024 campaign when it dawned on me that this quarterback was really special. Injuries have hampered his rise just a bit, but people shouldn’t forget how magical he was throughout the Sun Devils’ march to a Big 12 championship.

Just like with Kiffin, imagine what he can do with this stable of weapons at his disposal. He was already dynamite in Kenny Dillingham’s offense. Kiffin’s system opens up a whole other world of possibilities.

LSU basically rebuilt its roster overnight. What position group makes you feel best about that experiment, and which one makes you nervous?

Zion: They have a brand-new wide receiver room. Kiffin brought in seven wideouts, highlighted by Jayce Brown, Jackson Harris and Winston Watkins Jr., and I’m a big fan of that group. There are a lot of different options for Kiffin and Leavitt to work with.

The defensive tackle position worries me more. There’s talent there, but it’s a young and inexperienced group that will have to prove itself against SEC offensive lines.

Seth: LSU has historically never had a problem when it comes to the wide receiver position — Odell Beckham Jr., Justin Jefferson, Ja’Marr Chase, Malik Nabers … the list goes on and on — and, if Zion is right here, it shouldn’t be a problem again. I’m particularly intrigued by Jayce Brown, who was one of the lone bright spots of Kansas State’s 2025 campaign and should bring another level of explosiveness to an offense that already has plenty of it.

How long is Lane Kiffin’s honeymoon period at LSU?

Zion: I think LSU fans will love Kiffin until proven otherwise. He’s the guy they’ve been waiting for, and he’s a massive upgrade over Brian Kelly.

Obviously, expectations are going to be high from the beginning, but I think there’s a lot of excitement about what he can build in Baton Rouge.

Seth: One year. If the Tigers enter 2027 and Kiffin stumbles out of the gate, I expect to hear a lot of backtracking from the same folks who paraded this hire as the coup of the century. I don’t know, it just feels like there’s some hubris on the horizon for a ton of people down in Louisiana.

Perhaps that’s just me being cynical and jaded toward the whole LSU experience at this point, but it’s hard to be thrilled about all the noise.

Give me the scenario where this goes completely off the rails.

Zion: I could see a scenario where the Tigers lose back-to-back games against Ole Miss and Texas A&M. If that happens, the concerns will heighten quickly and this operation could start to implode.

It’s unlikely, but it’s certainly not impossible.

Seth: A loss to Ole Miss would be otherworldly in terms of bad vibes. Kiffin talked the talk, and he’ll have to walk the walk in Oxford. I cannot wait for that game.

The real disaster scenario, at least in my opinion, hinges on how well this team survives all the outside pressure. With all the drama and all the noise, LSU has to keep its head on its shoulders and focus on the task at hand. Any distraction could veer the ship off course, and it’s up to Kiffin and this roster to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Conversely, what does Lane Kiffin actually have to accomplish in Year 1 for this season to be considered a success?

Zion: If LSU wins 10 games and is at least in the top 15, I would consider that a successful season. A lot of people think the Tigers have to make the College Football Playoff right away, but that’s a tall task in Year 1.

They can absolutely do it, but as long as they’re in the conversation, I think that’s fine. Regardless, I don’t think it’ll take long for Kiffin to build a winner in Baton Rouge.

Seth: I’d go as far as to say that if LSU doesn’t achieve what Zion said would constitute a successful season, then it would be a failure. So, so much money was spent on this roster — and this coaching staff — that results are expected right away. Nobody in Baton Rouge signed up for a multiyear rebuild.

Which player, other than the quarterback, excites you the most on LSU’s roster?

Zion: I’m a massive Trey’Dez Green fan. He should flourish in this offense and has a chance to become one of the premier tight ends in the sport.

Also, remember the name Ty Benefield. The former Boise State safety is highly regarded by the coaching staff, and I think he could have a massive season.

Seth: I, too, adore Trey’Dez Green. There’s no tight end in the country who possesses the combination of raw talent and ability that he has, which is what makes the pursuit of Dae’Quan Wright, the former Browns tight end who was waived during the preseason, so confusing.

Perhaps there’s room for both, and Kiffin obviously knows Wright well from their time together at Ole Miss. But Green is already sitting there as one of the most tantalizing weapons in college football. I’d be feeding that dude the ball every chance I got.

Give me one LSU prediction that you believe right now but would probably be embarrassed to have read back to you in January.

Zion: I don’t necessarily believe this will happen, but if you told me LSU runs the table and wins the SEC, I wouldn’t be surprised.

This roster has enough talent, and Kiffin is good enough offensively, that the ceiling is incredibly high if everything comes together.

Seth: I struggle to see LSU peaking in the first year under Kiffin, though I presume it’s not an impossibility. There’s always a chance that something magical happens, especially with this much talent and one of the best offensive coaches in the country pulling the strings.

I just think there are too many new pieces, too much noise and too difficult a schedule for everything to come together immediately. Then again, if LSU is sitting in Atlanta playing for the SEC championship in December, nobody should pretend the possibility wasn’t staring us in the face all along.

There are dozens of teams capable of having good college football seasons in 2026. There are probably 15 or so with a legitimate path to the College Football Playoff, and depending on how loose you want to get with the word “contender,” somewhere between six and 10 could talk themselves into believing a national championship is actually possible.

But there are four teams I keep coming back to: Texas, Texas A&M, Indiana and LSU.

These aren’t necessarily the four best teams in college football, though some or all of them could eventually fit that description depending on how the season unfolds. No, they’re the four squads I believe will have the largest impact on how we experience this season. Texas enters another year with a loaded roster and national championship expectations after failing to reach the playoff in 2025. Texas A&M finally broke through under Mike Elko and now has to prove it wasn’t a one-year excursion toward greatness. LSU, meanwhile, handed Lane Kiffin the keys to the castle and told him that he can do whatever the heck he wants.

And then there’s Indiana.

There probably isn’t a stranger sentence in college football right now than this one: The Indiana Hoosiers are the defending national champions.

Two years after Curt Cignetti inherited a program that had won three games the season before, Indiana went 16-0, won the Big Ten, captured the national championship and completely rewrote what Hoosier football can be.

Indiana isn’t sneaking up on anyone anymore. The Hoosiers enter 2026 with legitimate expectations to contend for another title, even after losing a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback and several other important pieces from last year’s team. The question is no longer whether Indiana can belong among college football’s elite. It’s whether Cignetti has built something capable of staying there.

There are few people I’d rather ask about that than my friend Jason Hiebner, easily the biggest Indiana fan I know and also one of the smartest college football brains I know. So, with Indiana attempting to defend a national championship — still an objectively ridiculous collection of English words — I wanted to know how Jason is processing the Hoosier’s new reality and whether another run at the top of the sport is actually possible.

First things first: Does saying “Indiana is the defending national champion” feel normal yet?

Jason: No, and I don’t think it ever will. Before Cignetti, I thought the mountaintop of Indiana football was Michael Penix Jr. beating Penn State in 2020, in a game, fittingly enough, where no Hoosier fans were able to be in attendance. The last time the Hoosiers had been in national prominence before that? The 1968 Rose Bowl.

I cannot fully express what Cignetti, Indiana football and being defending 16-0 national champions mean to Bloomington, the state of Indiana and the more than 800,000 Hoosier alumni.

Seth: I’ll never get over Indiana winning a national title. Even if the Hoosiers never reach those heights again, the 2025 season was special because Indiana captured the hearts and minds of college football fans across the country. If Indiana can do it, why can’t anybody?

What is the biggest misconception people outside of Bloomington have about Indiana entering 2026?

Jason: I think a lot of the talking points in the national media are about Josh Hoover and the “questions” about what quarterback play will look like for Indiana, so I’ll provide a different misconception: Indiana is less talented than last season.

I talk about it throughout some of these questions at length, but Indiana absolutely is among the most talented teams in the country. Cignetti landed one of the best portal classes in the country, returned All-Americans and All-Big Ten players in Carter Smith, Rolijah Hardy and Tyrique Tucker, and continues to improve in high school recruiting. While the quarterback situation gets a lot of the conversation nationally, the roster shows a team just as poised to dominate on Saturdays.

Seth: Jason is absolutely right, which makes the proposition of how far Indiana can go pretty scary. The schedule isn’t easy, but when has doubting Cignetti’s ability to maneuver his way through a season ever been the correct move? It hasn’t.

How much of last season is actually replicable?

Jason: That is the same question we asked heading into last season, and we all saw what happened. If you ask Cignetti, everything is possible with a plan and a blueprint.

When you look at this 2026 team compared to last year’s team, there are only a few position groups that might have regressed. Quarterback, obviously. The tight end room has no proven, experienced players to replace Riley Nowakowski, and you lost arguably the best boundary corner in all of college football last year in D’Angelo Ponds. However, I think there is an argument that, on paper, every other position group is as talented as or better than it was on an undefeated squad.

The rise of Charlie Becker and addition of Michigan State transfer Nick Marsh put two first-round-caliber wide receivers in the same room. The defensive line is going to be one of the best units in college football, especially if Stephen Daley and Kellan Wyatt are deemed eligible. At running back, Khobie Martin will get a larger role to head a trio with Boston College transfer Turbo Richard and Lee Beebe Jr., who went out early last season with a torn ACL.

Simply put, the talent and coaching are there to repeat what happened last season. Can this team come from behind to win on the road, handle adversity and stay healthy enough to do so? Only time will tell.

Seth: The one thing Indiana can’t replicate is the mystique and wonder surrounding last season. The Hoosiers are part of the club now, which means they can no longer simultaneously claim membership among college football’s downtrodden.

Josh Hoover is following a Heisman Trophy winner who quarterbacked Indiana to a national championship. What does Indiana actually need from him?

Jason: In this Indiana system, the Hoosiers need Hoover to be someone who can run the offense, read the opposing defense and take the right opportunities downfield. Hoover will not be asked to throw 40 times a game. In fact, the Indiana offense would love to be able to run more than it passes.

However, when you have weapons on the outside like Hoover will have, he has to be able to put the ball in their hands while limiting turnovers. If Josh Hoover can perform at a level anywhere between Kurtis Rourke and Fernando Mendoza, then Hoover will put the Hoosiers in a position to win any football game.

Seth: As a TCU alum, I’m quite familiar with the Josh Hoover experience, which I’d describe as “chaotic.” He’s one of the most talented quarterbacks I’ve ever seen with my own two eyes, but the recklessness and turnovers are real. If Cignetti can unlock the good version of Hoover and level him up even slightly, I’m afraid that becomes a major problem for the Big Ten.

What’s the biggest legitimate concern you have about this team?

Jason: Cornerback.

D’Angelo Ponds was, and is, a special football player. He was really a cornerstone in Bryant Haines’ defensive system and allowed the Hoosiers to be aggressive up front. The Hoosiers return Jamari Sharpe, who had the game-sealing interception against Miami, and will likely start Ryland Gandy or AJ Harris on the other side of the field.

With Indiana playing Ohio State, USC and Washington in Big Ten play, the ability to defend the pass will be crucial. Do I think this position group is a real disadvantage? No. Rather, I think the concern lies in what this defense looks like for Bryant Haines without D’Angelo Ponds.

Seth: I’ll defer to Jason on this one, though it’s hard to overstate just how crucial Ponds was to everything Indiana did defensively. Put that pick-six against Oregon in the Peach Bowl on my television on repeat. What a moment.

Let’s say Indiana goes 10-2, makes the College Football Playoff and loses before the national championship game. Is that successful season now?

Jason: As much as it pains me to say it, yes, that would be a very successful season. Just a few years ago, this was an Indiana team that hadn’t won a bowl game since 1991. While this roster and coaching staff are capable of much more than a bowl victory, Cignetti continuing to take Indiana to the College Football Playoff would be very successful.

If Cignetti goes 8-4 for the next five years, while it might be disappointing now that we have reached the mountaintop, his legacy in the sport of college football would still be the stuff of legends.

Seth: Most fan bases in the country would take 10-2 and a College Football Playoff appearance in a heartbeat, so Indiana better still be part of that club. Sure, a national championship changes the bar, but this is still Indiana we’re talking about. Some perspective matters here.

Who is one player we’re not talking about enough right now who could become a major part of Indiana’s season?

Jason: This is a question I have gone back and forth on. I think the answer lies in presumed right tackle Joe Brunner.

This is an Indiana offensive line that returns three starters in Carter Smith, Drew Evans and Bray Lynch. Adedamola Ajani, who started games last year and split time with Kahlil Benson at right tackle, will shift inside and give Brunner the opportunity at right tackle.

Brunner, a Wisconsin transfer, brings the size, experience and ability to cement this offensive line as a contender for the Joe Moore Award. If Brunner can provide more stability at right tackle than the Hoosiers had last season, he will be the transfer who flew under the radar for Cignetti and company.

Seth: Indiana’s offensive line was an underrated part of its success in 2025, and if there’s any chance this year’s group is just as good, then, well, good luck. Hoover, those receivers and that running game operating behind another elite offensive line sounds terrifying.

Give me one completely irrational Indiana prediction for 2026 that you nevertheless believe.

Jason: As I thought about this question, it occurred to me that if I predicted Indiana to repeat as national champions, while it would certainly be unlikely, I don’t think anyone would deem it irrational. So, let’s get a little creative. A bit funky.

Prediction: Indiana has two 1,000-yard receivers and two 1,000-yard rushers.

In Cignetti’s two years at Indiana, he has not yet had a 1,000-yard receiver, and he had two 1,000-yard rushers with Kaelon Black and Roman Hemby last season. Indiana wants to pound the rock, and it has three legitimate options to hit the 1,000-yard mark this year in Turbo Richard, Khobie Martin and Lee Beebe Jr.

However, I think this is the year that might see a duo of 1,000-yard receivers. I think the depth at wideout is not as complete as it has been in years prior, plus it helps that Nick Marsh and Charlie Becker are both first-round NFL talents. Cignetti preaches balance on offense, so why not have two 1,000-yard rushers paired with two 1,000-yard receivers?

Will we need a few College Football Playoff games to get there? Probably, but I believe this irrational possibility is possible.

Seth: Turbo Richard.

That’s it. That’s my analysis. What a name. What a player. He could break records with the name alone.

There are dozens of teams capable of having good college football seasons in 2026. There are probably 15 or so with a legitimate path to the College Football Playoff, and depending on how loose you want to get with the word “contender,” somewhere between six and 10 could talk themselves into believing a national championship is actually possible.

But there are four teams I keep coming back to: Texas, Texas A&M, Indiana and LSU.

These aren’t necessarily the four best teams in college football, though some or all of them could eventually fit that description depending on how the season unfolds. No, they’re the four squads I believe will have the largest impact on how we experience this season. Texas enters another year with a loaded roster and national championship expectations after failing to reach the playoff in 2025. Indiana is attempting to figure out what life looks like after improbably going 16-0 and climbing to the top of the college football mountain. LSU, meanwhile, handed Lane Kiffin the keys to the castle and told him he can do whatever the heck he wants.

And then there’s Texas A&M.

For years, the Aggies were one of college football’s great theoretical programs. The recruiting, money and fan support were always there, but the results rarely followed. Until 2025, that is.

Texas A&M went 11-1 during the regular season and reached the College Football Playoff, finally breaking through under Mike Elko and looking like the program everyone in College Station had been waiting years to see. The ending left something to be desired — another loss to Texas followed by a crushing playoff defeat against Miami — but that didn’t erase everything that came before it.

Few people have waited longer for that breakthrough than my longtime friend Colby Dye, easily the biggest Aggies fan I know. Colby was also my throwing partner during our high school baseball days, and those who know understand that’s a special kind of bond. We’ve spent plenty of time over the years talking about Texas A&M athletics, usually with significantly less optimism than he has entering 2026.

So, with expectations in College Station finally matching the talent on the field, I wanted to know what Colby makes of the Aggies’ new reality — and whether last season was only the beginning.

You are probably the most diehard Texas A&M fan I know, so I’ll start here: How much, if at all, did the ending of last season ruin what should’ve been an incredible year?

Colby: The ending of last season did not ruin it for me. It may have made my birthday weekend worse, but it still did not ruin everything they accomplished.

I went into that season without a ton of confidence that we would do better than 8-4 because of all the uncertainties surrounding Marcel Reed and the offense. I think the Texas loss hurt more than the Miami loss, not only because it was Texas but because it kept us from the SEC championship game.

Seth: I appreciate the rational stance here because I know far too many A&M fans who decided everything was lost following the defeat to Texas in Austin. That game was brutal, and following it up with a playoff loss to Miami certainly didn’t help matters, but neither result erases everything that came before them.

The Aggies took a massive leap forward in 2025 under Mike Elko and produced the type of season this program has spent a long time waiting for. They won big games, legitimately competed near the top of the SEC and produced memorable moments that folks in College Station will remember for the rest of their lives. The ending stunk, but the season absolutely did not.

Now comes the considerably more difficult part: doing it again.

Did last season actually change the way you view this program?

Colby: It changed my view a ton. I knew Mike Elko was a good coach before last season started, but after the way last season went, I believe he is the answer for Texas A&M moving forward.

With him leading the team, I believe we can create a ton of havoc not only in the SEC but throughout college football.

Seth: As someone who has long participated in making fun of Texas A&M’s continued failures, 2025 was something of a wake-up call. The Aggies kept stacking wins, and eventually I was forced to look in the mirror and come to a difficult conclusion: Elko is the guy.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Texas A&M is going to win a national championship this year, or even the next. But I do believe that if Elko is in College Station long enough, this program is eventually going to win one. The Aggies have too many resources, too much talent and now, perhaps most importantly, the right coach leading the operation. That’s a combination I’d rather not bet against over the long haul.

What do you think the biggest difference is between the way an A&M fan views this team and the way everyone else views it?

Colby: A&M fans always have full confidence in our team, while everyone else seems to put us on upset watch every single week, no matter who we are playing.

In short, no one ever truly believes in this program besides true A&M fans.

Seth: I’d say this is somewhat true, as there’s always been a healthy dose of pessimism from the outside world toward A&M. But I’d also counter by pointing out that the Aggies have routinely found themselves near the top of preseason polls over the years, even when the evidence occasionally suggested they probably shouldn’t be there.

Last year’s success changes that conversation quite a bit, obviously, and Colby’s larger point still stands. No matter how talented the roster is or how high A&M climbs in the rankings, there always seems to be a sense that the Aggies are one bad Saturday away from everything collapsing in on itself. Fair or not, A&M is almost permanently stuck in prove-it mode.

Do you completely trust Marcel Reed?

Colby: After last year, I still did not fully believe he was the guy at quarterback. However, all the improvement and work I have seen and heard about over the offseason has completely changed that.

I now believe he is the best quarterback we have had since Johnny Manziel. That could be a hot take.

Listen, I’m not saying he is the perfect quarterback, but with the system we have in place and the help he has in the wide receiver and running back rooms, I think he is perfect for what we want to do.

Seth: I agree and disagree with this stance. Reed probably is the best quarterback the program has had since Johnny Manziel, but that’s honestly not saying all that much.

Kenny Hill, Kyle Allen, Trevor Knight, Nick Starkel, Kellen Mond, Haynes King — pre-Georgia Tech Haynes King, I might add — and Conner Weigman all took snaps under center after Manziel’s departure, and to call that a mixed bag would be an understatement. There were good moments scattered throughout, but nobody managed to elevate A&M quite like Reed did last season. Now he has to prove he can live somewhere close to that same ceiling for another full season, particularly with expectations considerably higher than they were a year ago.

What is the thing about this year’s team that has you lying awake at night thinking, “Oh no, this is how they’re going to get us?”

Colby: An easy answer is whether we can actually be consistent at making field goals. The inconsistency of Randy Bond last year still haunts me, and I hope that changes this year.

Another thing that scares me is our terrifying road schedule. LSU, Alabama and South Carolina are going to be huge tests for this team. If we only lose one road game, I have confidence that would be our only loss.

Seth: You know Colby is a massive fan when the first thing keeping him awake at night is the kicker position. He’s not entirely wrong, either.

After three relatively dependable seasons in College Station, Randy Bond went completely off the deep end in 2025, making just 12 of his 19 field-goal attempts. The biggest drop came from long range. Bond had made eight of his 11 attempts from 50 or more yards over the previous three seasons before going 0-for-3 from that distance last year.

A&M has since moved on to Illinois transfer David Olano, with the hope being that perhaps a little more consistency at that position could help the Aggies win on the margins.

Give me the player you’re irrationally excited about.

Colby: That is hard to choose because I am just over the top about the entire receiving room. If I had to pick one, I would say Isaiah Horton because we have not had that dominant, big-bodied receiver since Mike Evans. Reed has not had a receiver like that to throw to, so I am excited to see how we work that into our system.

Seth: Horton is particularly interesting because he gives Reed a different type of weapon than the speedy receivers that made A&M’s passing game so dangerous last season. There’s something incredibly appealing about pairing that type of big-bodied target with all the speed and explosiveness already surrounding him, and it should give Reed another option whenever the offense desperately needs someone to go make a play.

What would hurt more: going 8-4, or going 11-1 and losing to Texas again?

Colby: Going 8-4 and beating Texas sounds great until you realize that probably keeps you out of the playoff. Going 11-1 and losing to Texas still gives you an extremely high chance of making the CFP.

Being in the playoff is more important to me, so I would say 8-4 would hurt worse. I would love to finally break the stereotype of A&M always going 8-4.

Seth: Calling Texas A&M “Texas 8-4” was always the go-to jab for anybody making fun of the Aggies, and another season like last year would go a long way toward finally tossing that joke into the trash.

That doesn’t make the Texas game irrelevant. Far from it. A&M desperately needs to beat the Longhorns at some point, especially if it wants to shed the little-brother label. Losing to Texas every year while celebrating playoff appearances isn’t exactly going to make everyone in College Station happy.

But Colby is right about the larger goal. If given the choice between beating Texas during an otherwise disappointing 8-4 season or going 11-1 and competing for a national championship, I’m taking the latter every single time. Rivalries matter immensely in college football, but the entire point of building what Elko is building is to eventually win the whole damn thing.

Give me your most delusional Texas A&M prediction for 2026.

Colby: Mario Craver is a top-three receiver in all of college football. Jeremiah Smith is the only receiver I can say I truly believe is better than him.

I will give one final thought that I haven’t touched on yet. We have a whole new offensive line and a new stud middle linebacker. If the offensive line has good chemistry right off the bat and we have that head-seeking middle linebacker, CFP, here we come.

Seth: I’ll pull out the receipts if I have to, but I’ve been on the Mario Craver train since the beginning of last season. That dude is an absolute beast.

Putting him in the same neighborhood as Jeremiah Smith is certainly aggressive, but I don’t think it’s all that crazy to believe Craver could finish the season as one of the best receivers in the country. We already saw stretches of that ability in 2025, and another year alongside Reed should only make the connection more dangerous.

As for the rest of Colby’s prediction, I am not going to doubt Elko’s ability to lead his men into battle and come out the other side with a victory because last season proved that A&M isn’t sneaking up on anybody anymore. And with a lot of the same talent returning, as well as high-impact pieces arriving, there are legitimate reasons to believe the Aggies can be even better.

CFP, here they come?

There are dozens of teams that could have good college football seasons in 2026. There are probably 15 or so that could realistically make the College Football Playoff. Depending on how generous you want to get with the definition of “contender,” somewhere between six and 10 schools could convince themselves a national championship is possible.

But there are four teams I keep coming back to: Texas, Texas A&M, Indiana and LSU.

These aren’t necessarily the four best teams in college football, though some or all of them could eventually fit that description depending on how the season unfolds. No, they’re the four squads I believe will have the largest impact on how we experience this season. Texas A&M finally broke through under Mike Elko and now has to prove it wasn’t a one-year excursion toward greatness. Indiana is attempting to figure out what life looks like after improbably going 16-0 and climbing to the top of the college football mountain. LSU, meanwhile, handed Lane Kiffin the keys to the castle and told him that he can do whatever the heck he wants.

And then there’s Texas.

No team entered last season carrying more expectations, and few left it feeling quite as strange. The Longhorns were the preseason No. 1 team in America according to both the AP poll and myself but finished the season outside the College Football Playoff. Some early-season misgivings were to blame for the unfortunate fate of Steve Sarkisian’s team, including but not limited to Arch Manning’s slow buildup and the offense’s inability to run the ball worth a lick, but the year ended in a fine spot, leaving Texas fans with optimism heading into 2026.

Speaking of Texas fans, Travis Davidson has been a longtime friend and is perhaps the most passionate Longhorn supporter I know. I don’t believe there’s a human on the planet who thinks about Texas athletics quite as much as Travis. If anyone understands the mixture of optimism, anxiety and inevitable nonsense that comes with believing in this program, it’s him.

So, rather than spend the next several minutes pretending I understand the inner workings of the Texas psyche, I figured I’d go directly to the source.

Why should I believe Texas will actually live up to the hype this time?

Travis: This team will live up to it because they have a rare blend of experience, development and, of course, raw talent. Look at the players they’ve recruited over the past few years. Look at the transfer portal acquisitions. Look at the year the star players are in — they’re all off to the NFL after this year — and look at the coaching staff moves made this offseason.

This is what Sark has built toward, this is what the players have built toward, and the fans realize it.

Seth: I was driving the Texas bandwagon last year — I had the Longhorns ranked No. 1 in my preseason poll, and it took me a while to come off that take — and watched the wheels slowly fall off somewhere between Columbus and the middle of SEC play before everything seemed to even out toward the end. Still, it’s hard for me to get back on the bus after getting screwed over last year.

But Travis’ point about how last season ended is incredibly important. Texas looked much more like the team everyone expected by the time December rolled around, particularly Manning, and there’s still an absurd amount of talent on this roster, arguably more. While I’m not pretending 2025 didn’t happen, I’m just not sure it told us all that much about what Texas is going to be in 2026.

How much did the way Arch Manning finished last season change your opinion of him?

Travis: It was reassuring to see a stronger second half from him. My confidence in him is not bulletproof — he still struggled with accuracy and decision-making at times down the stretch — but the progression from Aug. 30 in Columbus, Ohio, to the Citrus Bowl is reason for optimism.

Seth: This is pretty much where I land with Arch, too. The beginning of last season was rough. Even the most casual of college football fans were taken aback by how average he appeared. But he got better. A lot better. And while that doesn’t automatically pencil him in as the Heisman winner, it does say a ton about how much growth there was from the first game of the season to the last.

What’s the biggest misconception people outside of Austin have about this Texas team?

Travis: I’m not sure it’s necessarily a misconception, but there seems to be so much focus on the passing game while skimming over the run game. All of Sark’s good offenses start with a solid run game. Until last year, he had a 1,000-plus-yard rusher every year that he has coached.

They went out and got Raleek Brown and Hollywood Smothers for a reason. The run game’s inefficiencies put so much pressure on Arch last year. Sark isn’t trying to ease that pressure on Arch by just forcing the passing game more than ever with new weapons; he’s easing it through the run game.

Seth: I’m glad Travis went here because the Arch conversation has continuously swallowed basically everything else about Texas for more than a year. He matters, obviously. Quarterbacks tend to be rather important to the operation.

But Texas has to be able to run the football. It absolutely has to. There are really no ifs, ands or buts about that claim. There were large stretches of last season when the rushing attack was inept, limiting how effective Arch and his stable of weapons could be. If that changes in 2026, watch out, world.

Is this actually a better team than last year’s, or have we just talked ourselves into Texas again?

Travis: Yes, it is better than last year’s team. In fairness, I bought the hype from last year’s team, but it was a young squad across the board. The 2026 Longhorns are stronger on both lines of scrimmage, deeper at every skill position except perhaps tight end and collectively more experienced.

Seth: On paper, this Longhorns squad might just be the most talented roster in the country. There are few holes. One has to believe that all these spectacular recruiting and transfer hauls would have to amount to some modicum of success, right? Right?

What scares you most about this team?

Travis: I am scared about how the depth will hold up throughout the brutal schedule: nine SEC games plus a nonconference game against Ohio State.

To spotlight a specific position: linebacker. Rasheem Biles will probably be one of the better players on the team, but behind him it’s a room full of transfers and young players. After Ty’Anthony Smith’s dismissal, the depth there is something to watch.

Seth: Texas’ schedule is nuts, frankly. The nonconference bout versus Ohio State hangs like a menacing cloud ready to unleash potential life-threatening floods, though it also presents a golden opportunity for the Longhorns to start building a résumé. Following the Buckeyes, Texas has to play Tennessee, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, Missouri, LSU and Texas A&M. All those teams are ranked in the top 25, and that doesn’t even mention the ones like Florida that are currently outside that group, if only barely. It’s a gauntlet, but if there’s any roster that can withstand it, I’d bet on Texas’.

At what point does Steve Sarkisian actually have to win the whole thing?

Travis: Based on what’s listed above, right now.

I am incredibly pro-Sark. His greatest critics must not have been around for the Strong and Herman years. Three consecutive 10-win seasons is remarkable, but everyone knows more is expected. Twice he fell short of playing for a national championship by a couple of plays.

From the start, he’s preached coming here to win championships. There’s a reason he’s so outward in his praise for this team. He knows what the expectations are, and that’s why he’s here and why he’s built this team to what it is in 2026.

Seth: I agree with Travis here, and I think Texas fans occasionally need to remember what life looked like before Sarkisian showed up. In a word, it was brutal.

Now, obviously, none of that means Sark gets a lifetime achievement award and everyone goes home happy. This roster is good enough to win the whole thing. At some point, though, what if needs to turn into reality.

Who are you most excited to watch other than Arch?

Travis: While it was tempting to pick a wide receiver here, I’ll go with Colin Simmons. He’s a true matchup nightmare and is flying up the program leaderboard for career sacks. Twenty-one sacks through two years is remarkable.

In Will Muschamp’s defense, I’m curious how he’ll take advantage of his one-on-ones while also opening up opportunities for the rest of the defense.

Seth: I’ve always been on the Colin Simmons hype train, routinely calling him my favorite player in the country to watch. If Muschamp is able to fully unlock his potential, unleashing havoc on every offensive line Simmons and Texas face, then there’s little reason to doubt that the Longhorns’ defense will be anything but special in 2026.

Give me one completely irrational Texas prediction for 2026 that you nevertheless believe.

Travis: Ryan Wingo will lead the team in receiving yards.

Everyone is talking about Cam Coleman, and for good reason. It’s the cliché for having two great receivers — you can’t double them both. I think Wingo will get more one-on-ones, generate more yards after the catch and rack up a ton of yards from the quick passing game and screen game that Sark loves so much. There’s a legit chance both he and Coleman go over 1,000 yards.

Seth: To be honest, I don’t even know if the Ryan Wingo take is particularly irrational.

Texas has enough weapons that defenses aren’t going to be able to spend the entire day worrying about him. Cam Coleman is obviously at the forefront of this conversation, as he’s the standout transfer pickup and flat-out one of the best receivers, if not overall athletes, in the entire nation. But Wingo is talented in his own right, and I fully expect him to take that next step this season. If he does, then Travis’ prediction could very well come true.

Has Travis convinced me to jump aboard the Texas bandwagon? Unfortunately, he absolutely has.

Not only do I believe that the Longhorns have what it takes to win the SEC, something I picked in my preview for that conference the other day, but I see a world where a trip to the title game is not only a possibility but somewhat likely. Of course, all that hinges on several things going right, including Arch being a standout at his position and the running game coming back to life. There’s also the schedule of it all, though if Texas is as good as Travis and I seem to think it is, that can only be used as an excuse for so long.

So, yeah, Texas is going to be great. I’ve somehow ended up right back where I started a year ago, convinced the Longhorns have everything necessary to be one of the last teams standing.

I guess the joke’s on me if this turns out to be a total sham again.

To me, it doesn’t really matter. The SEC is still the heartbeat of college football in many ways, with much of the sport’s diehard fanbase residing in the South and, by proxy, giving the region some of the most electric stadium atmospheres not just in America but in the entire world. The mythos of the Iron Bowl, traveling to play at The Swamp or watching Texas and Oklahoma play Red River in the Cotton Bowl are some of the best aspects of college football, and there’s a certain level of insanity attached to this conference that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else. This is a place where losing three football games can spark an existential crisis and a governor can suddenly become a recurring character in a coaching search. It’s wonderful.

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That hasn’t necessarily translated into national championships lately, though. It’s been three seasons since an SEC team won the national title, an unfathomably long drought for a league that spent nearly two decades treating the trophy like Nick Saban’s personal property, and the Big Ten has now won three straight.

The 2026 season presents another opportunity to change that, and there certainly isn’t a shortage of candidates. Texas and Georgia are the two teams I trust most, while Alabama, Ole Miss, LSU and Texas A&M all have legitimate playoff aspirations. Behind them sits a giant pile of programs ranging from potentially dangerous to “I guess I could see it,” as well as some that have the potential to be absolute dog crap. Oh, and the new nine-game conference schedule should only make everything messier once everybody starts beating the heck out of each other and three-loss SEC teams begin demanding playoff bids in November.

I can already hear the discourse.

Texas and Georgia Lead the Way

To me, the linchpin in the SEC this season is Texas. Coming off a year when the expectations were sky-high and then subsequently not met, the Longhorns are now in an interesting position where merely making the College Football Playoff doesn’t seem like enough, but actually winning a national title seems somewhat difficult as well. Texas entered last season with enormous expectations and spent much of the early going looking nothing like the team everyone had imagined, with Arch Manning struggling underneath a ridiculous amount of preseason hype before eventually settling down and playing considerably better football down the stretch.

That improvement is the primary reason I’m willing to go right back to Texas in 2026. The preseason Heisman conversation became absurd last year before Manning had really done anything to earn it, with people essentially treating the Manning surname like one of those Mario Kart power-ups that automatically launches you forward at the speed of light, but the player we saw later in the season looked significantly more comfortable. Steve Sarkisian has now surrounded him with enough offensive talent that there really shouldn’t be many excuses, either. Cam Coleman comes over from Auburn, Ryan Wingo remains in place and the backfield has been reinforced with Raleek Brown and Hollywood Smothers, giving Texas the sort of collection of skill players that makes Sarkisian’s offense particularly terrifying.

It wouldn’t be hard to convince me that the Longhorns could have the best offense in the country when everything is said and done. A lot of that obviously depends on what Manning winds up accomplishing, but with Arch at the helm and that stable of talent around him, there doesn’t seem to be a ceiling that’s too high for Texas in 2026.

Georgia is a different kind of contender because Kirby Smart’s program has reached the point where regular-season excellence barely registers anymore. The Bulldogs are going to win a bunch of games, recruit absurdly well and eventually unveil another collection of defensive players who look like they were constructed in the same laboratory that produced Ivan Drago. This operation is still one of the most stable in college football, and you can essentially pencil Georgia into the national conversation every August without thinking particularly hard about it.

The problem is what happens once the Bulldogs actually reach the playoff. Two consecutive one-and-done exits have made this once-invincible operation feel slightly more vulnerable, and one of the chief reasons, in my opinion, is the quarterback position. Georgia fans have lambasted me for this take before, but I simply don’t believe Gunner Stockton elevates a team to a national title ceiling. He’s capable of getting Georgia where it needs to be during the regular season, but when the lights have shone at their brightest, Stockton hasn’t been able to get the Bulldogs over the line.

People said similar things about Stetson Bennett, of course, and we all know how that turned out, so perhaps I’m simply failing to see the grand vision here. Maybe Stockton spends January smoking a cigar with a national championship trophy while somebody screenshots this paragraph and sends it to me 400 times. The rest of the roster is certainly good enough for that to happen. Either way, the goal at Georgia is a championship. Anything short will once again feel like a failure.

Four Teams, Four Different Kinds of Chaos

The Kalen DeBoer reckoning might soon be coming at Alabama, as 2026 feels like a make-or-break year for a coach who has failed to live up to the Mount Everest-sized expectations Saban manufactured in Tuscaloosa. Eight losses in two seasons, combined with a blowout Rose Bowl exit against Indiana, have bloodied the Crimson Tide more than at almost any point in recent memory. Alabama is still good, obviously, but merely being good in Tuscaloosa has historically been treated with the same level of concern most fan bases reserve for a natural disaster. Nine wins anywhere else gets you a nice bowl game and a commemorative T-shirt; at Alabama, it gets you three weeks of Finebaum callers demanding a congressional inquiry.

Perhaps Keelon Russell changes the tenor of everything. One of the best quarterback recruits in the country several years ago out of Duncanville, Russell possesses the sort of arm talent that immediately gets your attention, and I’m a believer in what he can eventually become. He’s also a redshirt freshman taking over one of the most scrutinized positions in American sports, so there will almost certainly be growing pains. How quickly those disappear could determine whether DeBoer spends December preparing for the playoff or answering increasingly uncomfortable questions about his employment status.

Ole Miss enters an equally strange season after last year’s run to the final four. Kiffin is obviously gone — more on that circus in a moment — but Trinidad Chambliss and Pete Golding remain after helping the Rebels accomplish things the program had dreamed about for years. Expecting Ole Miss to recreate that magical run would probably be foolish, but Chambliss gives the Rebels an outstanding security blanket because of his ability to rescue broken plays and create something from nothing.

Everything lives and dies with him. There will almost certainly be regression somewhere because seasons like 2025 are nearly impossible to reproduce, but having a quarterback that reliable gives Golding a chance to navigate the post-Kiffin transition without everything immediately falling apart. Ole Miss might not be a national semifinalist again, but I’m also not going to be the idiot who completely dismisses a team that just spent four months proving everybody wrong.

Speaking of Kiffin, let’s talk about LSU.

Kiffin is in the house, and so is the drama! Let’s bring in NFL players! Let’s spend approximately the gross domestic product of a small country on the roster! Let’s try to be on the front page of the papers every single day!

The LSU show has become the college football equivalent of a mid-2000s VH1 reality show: objectively chaotic, occasionally embarrassing and absolutely impossible to turn off once you’ve watched the first five minutes. Sam Leavitt comes over from Arizona State, the receiving corps has been completely restocked and Kiffin remains one of the best offensive minds in the sport, which means I have very little doubt this team is going to score points. Seemingly a bajillion dollars were spent constructing the roster, and with that comes expectations of greatness.

The ceiling is so high it’s otherworldly, but Kiffin has also been known to crash and burn. And this is still LSU we’re talking about. In a place where the state governor was intimately involved in the last coaching saga and local judges are issuing rulings that can alter the college football landscape, there’s always a possibility things start to go haywire.

Texas A&M might be the easiest team in this group to understand because I’ve decided to label the Aggies as one of those schools that could be better this season while finishing with a worse record. A&M went 11-1 during the 2025 regular season before ending the year with losses to Texas and Miami, which turned what had been a really fun campaign into the football equivalent of eating an excellent steak dinner and then discovering your car got towed while you were inside.

I remain incredibly bullish on Mike Elko, to the point where I firmly believe he will lead Texas A&M to a national championship at some point during his tenure, but the limitations of Marcel Reed remain aplenty in my opinion. Mario Craver and Rueben Owens II give him excellent skill talent, yet both lines are being rebuilt and the schedule is considerably less forgiving. A&M could improve as a football team and still lose three games, which is basically the SEC experience distilled into one sentence.

The SEC’s Giant Pile of “I Guess?”

Oklahoma probably deserves to sit toward the top of this group after making the playoff last season, though I still have questions about how sustainable that success actually was. Brent Venables finally produced the elite defense everybody expected when Oklahoma hired him, but that unit spent far too much of 2025 dragging around an offense that simply wasn’t very good. John Mateer returns and the receiving corps has been reworked, so there’s reason for optimism, but the schedule is horrific enough that Oklahoma could be genuinely good and still spend November fighting for its playoff life.

Florida is considerably more fun because Jon Sumrall has arrived in Gainesville, providing the Gators with what should be a nice reprieve from the misfortune that was Billy Napier. Sumrall is one of the best coaches in the sport, in my opinion, and having him on the payroll is absolutely massive for a school that has spent the better part of the last decade hiring coaches, convincing itself this one will restore Florida football and then returning to the coaching carousel three or four years later like somebody who keeps downloading the same dating app after swearing they’re done with it.

There are pieces here, too. Jadan Baugh gives Florida a legitimate centerpiece in the backfield, while Aaron Philo follows offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner from Georgia Tech and should at least provide some stability at quarterback. The Gators might still be a year away from truly mattering, but Sumrall has been too good everywhere he’s gone for me to dismiss the possibility that this turns around considerably faster than expected.

Tennessee is the team I can’t talk myself into no matter how many times I try. Faizon Brandon has excellent potential, Josh Heupel has already proven he can build a playoff-caliber team and Jim Knowles should help repair a defense that completely unraveled last season. There are plenty of individual pieces I like, which makes my skepticism somewhat difficult to explain, but sometimes sports analysis simply comes down to vibes, and my Tennessee vibes are quite low. Maybe that’s just residual Dolly Parton sadness swaying my feelings.

Speaking of pessimism, that’s basically all Auburn has possessed for the last half-decade, if not more. Alex Golesh has arrived alongside what feels like the entirety of South Florida’s roster, including quarterback Byrum Brown, which should at least give the Tigers an offensive identity immediately. It’s up to the interpreter to decide whether importing USF en masse is enough to compete in the SEC, but after the Brian Harsin debacle and replacing him with Hugh Freeze for some reason I’ll never understand, simply having a coherent plan feels like progress.

Missouri, South Carolina and Vanderbilt all fall somewhere around this same neighborhood, though I’m not particularly bullish on any of them. Missouri is consistently overrated, in my opinion, even if Eli Drinkwitz deserves credit for making the Tigers reliably competent. I’m sure Missouri will win eight games, briefly appear at No. 17 in the AP poll and spend two weeks convincing everyone it’s a dark-horse playoff contender before losing a game by 16 points. Nature is healing.

South Carolina at least has LaNorris Sellers, meaning a breakout is always a couple of spectacular plays away. Sellers remains one of the most physically gifted quarterbacks in college football, but Kendal Briles is now calling the offense, and I’m all too familiar with how boom-or-bust that experience can become. One week the Gamecocks might look like the 2007 Patriots. The next they might spend three quarters repeatedly running into a defensive tackle while spending entirely too much time attempting to establish themselves via screen plays that go for zero yards.

Vanderbilt, meanwhile, enters a transition period after the Diego Pavia era finally came to an end, which remains a remarkable sentence considering Vanderbilt football having an “era” worth mourning would’ve sounded absurd several years ago. Clark Lea deserves enormous credit for what he built, but replacing the quarterback who became the face of the entire operation is an enormous task. Five-star freshman Jared Curtis provides an exciting future, though he’s not the projected starter — at least for now.

Somebody Has to Lose These Games

While the SEC has tremendous depth and its middle is arguably better than anybody else’s, its bad is just about as bad as anybody else’s. Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi State are probably going to stink this season, although they’ve arrived at that destination through considerably different routes.

Arkansas has a new head coach in Ryan Silverfield, a hire that made the fan base so angry the reaction itself almost became more interesting than the actual coaching search. He inherits a program coming off a miserable season and immediately has to navigate another brutal SEC schedule, which isn’t exactly the ideal environment for convincing thousands of people who hated your hiring that they were wrong.

Kentucky is more frustrating because I absolutely adored the Will Stein hire. Stein was one of the best offensive coordinators in college football at Oregon and represents exactly the kind of swing Kentucky should be taking after the Mark Stoops era finally reached its conclusion. The problem is that it doesn’t seem like the administration has invested the necessary resources into this roster to make the Wildcats immediately competitive, at least in football.

Then there’s Mississippi State, which continues to occupy one of the most unforgiving positions in major college football. The Bulldogs have won two SEC games over the last two seasons and are attempting to build a competitive roster without the resources enjoyed by most of the programs surrounding them. There are occasional signs of life, but the overall situation remains bleak enough that discussing Mississippi State in a conference preview feels a little like reaching the final minutes of Titanic and wondering whether the ship might actually pull through this time.

Probably not.

So, Who Wins the SEC?

Texas.

I know what happened last season, and I know how ridiculous it feels to spend another year talking ourselves into the Longhorns after the preseason hype train went careening off the tracks in 2025. Georgia is probably the safer pick because Kirby Smart has built the most reliable program in the conference, but I just can’t help but be attracted to Austin.

There’s simply too much offensive talent for me to ignore, and the defense could be quite special as well. Manning looked considerably more comfortable once the hysteria surrounding him finally subsided last season, and Steve Sarkisian has given him everything necessary to make another run at this thing. I picked Texas last year and got burned, but apparently I learned nothing.

Give me the Longhorns.

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Whew, boy.

Where do I start?

College football has officially returned to our lives, and on paper that should be a good thing. For many, Week 0’s annual trip to Ireland is a welcome addition to the television schedule, the ceremonial beginning of another season after eight long months spent waiting for the sport to return. It’s also an objectively hilarious way to begin college football every year, considering we pack up two teams, fly them across the Atlantic Ocean and drop them into a country where the weather seems almost contractually obligated to make the actual football as miserable as possible.

But any discourse about the location and conditions of the game doesn’t really matter because the teams playing in it ultimately dictate the narrative, and after watching TCU and North Carolina slog through four quarters Saturday, only one word came to mind.

Slop.

Pig slop. Hog slop. Cafeteria slop. The mysterious brown slop they feed prisoners in cartoons. Pick your preferred variety because it was all there Saturday, and it never really let up.

There are two avenues through which to dissect North Carolina’s 15-10 win. The first belongs to the Tar Heels, where Bill Belichick just picked up the first marquee victory of his college coaching career after being embarrassed by the Horned Frogs in the opening contest of 2025. North Carolina looked considerably more competent this time around, which is major news for a program that spent much of last season looking like it had absolutely no idea what it was doing.

Then there’s TCU, and my goodness, I don’t know what just happened.

Head coach Sonny Dykes spent all offseason talking about how his team needed to limit the mistakes that had cost it games in previous years, something that sounded wonderful considering those mistakes have become an increasingly annoying feature of TCU football. Then the Frogs actually played a game and committed 11 penalties, looked increasingly incompetent on offense and employed a quarterback who, at least through one afternoon, appeared to pale in comparison to the previous one who was (kind of) pushed out the door. So much for cleaning things up.

And that’s where I want to start because the Craig hype was rampant heading into the season. TCU folks raved about his intelligence — he did graduate from Harvard, after all — as well as his spectacular athletic build. He might not be as pure a passer as Josh Hoover was, but everything coming out of Fort Worth indicated that the offense would be more dynamic with him at the helm. Add in new offensive coordinator Gordon Sammis bringing another dimension to the running attack, and I was sold on the idea that TCU could become a much more consistent offense, even if it looked considerably different from what we had grown accustomed to with Hoover.

Of course, preseason expectations are only that, and once it came time for the dirty business Saturday, TCU failed time and again. Yes, Jeremy Payne was largely good, rushing for 142 yards on 25 carries, but even he became increasingly limited as the rain intensified and the game turned into the sort of slog that made moving the football even more difficult. That meant there were going to be moments when TCU needed Craig to make something happen, and when those moments arrived, he was largely absent.

Take the final offensive play of the game for the Frogs. Facing fourth-and-2, Craig rolled out of the pocket and seemingly had two options to keep TCU alive: 1) barrel his way forward and use the size and athleticism we had heard about for months or 2) throw across his body to a receiver who was, admittedly, wide open but represented a much less certain proposition than simply pulling out the do-it-yourself kit. He elected to use the latter strategy, and it went about as well as when Ross tried to convince Rachel they were on a break.

That play was a microcosm of the entire afternoon because TCU continuously found ways to make things more difficult than they needed to be. From inexplicable penalties to baffling play calling, it took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to storm out of the room and gouge my eyes out. Perhaps that’s a bit of an overexaggeration — and it also very clearly expresses my biases when analyzing this particular football game — but it’s not all that far from the truth. TCU was that bad Saturday, and by the time it was over, I found myself wondering whether this was the most embarrassing loss I’ve ever witnessed in my lifelong support of the school.

Maybe that’s wrong, too, because there are certainly plenty of contenders. You can start with the national championship game, where nobody necessarily expected TCU to go out and rip Georgia’s throat out, but losing 65-7 was so stinky that I’m still not entirely sure the program has washed away the stench. Then came Deion Sanders and Colorado marching into Fort Worth to open the 2023 season and immediately popping whatever balloon remained from that magical 2022 campaign. Losing 66-42 to SMU in 2024, complete with Dykes getting ejected in the process, stings quite a bit, and following that up with a loss to a miserable Houston team that same year wasn’t exactly pleasant, either.

There are several more, but listing them all out won’t do any good because they increasingly point toward the same conclusion: Dykes just doesn’t have what it takes to elevate TCU back to the ceiling everybody thought this program might consistently reach after 2022. That season was a fluke. Everybody probably knows it somewhere deep down in their hearts, but it has taken me a while to come to grips with it because none of the joy, happiness and wonder from that run can ever be taken away.

But that was four years ago, and everything we’ve seen since has made it increasingly evident that 2022 was the exception rather than the beginning of something.

I’m fairly confident in my opinion that TCU will be searching for a new head coach by the time December rolls around, and perhaps that sounds like an overreaction after one game until you remember what has happened to some of the other teams unfortunate enough to lose in Ireland. Nebraska felt it and eventually fired Scott Frost. Florida State entered the arena the year after being snubbed from the College Football Playoff, was upset by Georgia Tech and proceeded to go 2-10. Last year, Kansas State lost Farmageddon to Iowa State in Dublin, resulting in a ridiculous moment where its starting quarterback’s brother and father were getting into a brawl in a parking lot after the game. Ireland is not kind to losing football programs.

Obviously, none of that has any actual bearing on what happens to TCU from here, but when you add in just how bad the Frogs looked Saturday, it’s not difficult to jump to the conclusion that Dykes’ time in Fort Worth might be ending sooner than anybody anticipated. This wasn’t simply a close loss in terrible weather where one bounce went the wrong way. It was yet another performance filled with the same mistakes and inconsistencies that have followed TCU for several years, which makes the contract extension Dykes somehow received this offseason all the more confusing.

North Carolina deserves credit for taking advantage of all of — *gestures wildly* — whatever the heck that all was. I’m just not ready to suddenly proclaim that Bill Belichick has figured everything out because the Tar Heels beat a TCU team that spent much of the afternoon tripping over itself. North Carolina is still not particularly good, at least from what I saw Saturday, and while it looked considerably more competent than it did a year ago, the bar for improvement was sitting somewhere around the Earth’s core.

There will inevitably be plenty of conversation about Belichick turning a corner after this, and to North Carolina’s credit, it did look better coached, especially offensively with Bobby Petrino manning the sticks. Yes, the Tar Heels made some of the same boneheaded mistakes TCU did, but they simply didn’t make as many of them, and sometimes that’s all it takes to win an ugly college football game. I think North Carolina is probably destined for a better season than the disaster it endured a year ago. I’m just not convinced it’s going to be that much better.

So, what did we learn after the first college football game of the season? It’s going to be a long year in Fort Worth, and perhaps Belichick sticks around for another in Chapel Hill. Or maybe we’re all jumping to conclusion. One thing I do know for certain is that I’m out on the Dykes experience – at least at this current moment. It’s going to take a lot to rope me back in.

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If the trend continues, I suppose it’s Oregon’s turn to win its first title in program history. So, congrats, Ducks. Glad we got that settled.

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Obviously, the reality is a little more complicated, although maybe not by much. Ohio State, Indiana and Oregon enter 2026 as three of the best teams in the country, and I would be pretty surprised if the Big Ten champion came from anywhere else. Behind them sits an enormous collection of teams ranging from legitimate College Football Playoff contenders to programs simply trying to remember what happiness feels like. There are also 18 teams in this conference, which means discussing all of them feels less like previewing a league and more like going through the guest list for a moderately sized wedding.

The Three That Can Win It All

Let’s start with Ohio State, the preseason No. 1 team in the AP poll and a program whose definition of “disappointment” is wildly different from that of approximately 98% of college football. The Buckeyes spent most of last season looking inevitable, rolling through team after team before Indiana finally stepped onto the same field in Indianapolis and everything came crashing down. The Hoosiers won the conference, Miami eventually knocked Ohio State out of the College Football Playoff and everybody in Columbus was left to stare silently into the dark abyss.

Luckily for head coach Ryan Day, 2026 presents another prime opportunity to reach the mountaintop, and having Julian Sayin at quarterback is a pretty good starting point. Sayin’s efficiency was absurd last season, and he once again gets the privilege of throwing footballs in the general direction of Jeremiah Smith every Saturday. That has to make quarterbacking significantly easier. Whenever things get difficult, just press the giant red button labeled THROW IT TO JEREMIAH and see what happens. Most quarterbacks in the country would commit minor crimes to have that luxury, and one of the most accurate passers in the sport just happens to be the lucky dude who gets it.

The funny thing is that Ohio State’s offense obviously doesn’t end there. Sophomore running back Bo Jackson — no, not that Bo Jackson, although his appearance would be somewhat believable given that former professionals are now attempting to return to college football — was dynamite last season, while Brandon Inniss returns alongside transfers Devin McCuin, Kyle Parker and plenty of other weapons. Then you flip over to the defense and find Jaylen McClain, Jermaine Mathews Jr., Zion Grady, Riley Pettijohn and approximately 74 other blue-chip players hiding underneath couch cushions inside the Woody Hayes Athletic Center.

At the end of the day, Day’s objective is a national championship. Anything less is a failure.

Then there’s Indiana, which is somehow a sentence we now say when discussing national championship contenders. I still don’t think we’ve fully appreciated what Curt Cignetti has done in Bloomington, taking arguably the most hopeless Power 4 program in existence and turning it into a national champion with the speed of one of those home renovation shows where a condemned building becomes a five-bedroom farmhouse in 42 minutes. Overstating how unbelievable this rise has been might actually be impossible. Cignetti is Hugh Jackman in The Prestige, except instead of duplicating himself inside a giant machine, he apparently figured out how to manufacture championship football teams in Bloomington.

The terrifying part — at least for the rest of college football — is that Indiana might be just as good again.

Everyone around the program has raved about a transfer portal class that could somehow be better than the one that helped deliver a ring, with the main piece being Josh Hoover’s arrival from TCU to replace Fernando Mendoza at quarterback. I have complicated feelings about that development because Hoover might have the best pure arm talent of any quarterback I’ve watched play for the Horned Frogs, capable of launching a football into spaces most quarterbacks wouldn’t even consider attempting. He can also occasionally throw it directly into the chest of a defender and make you wonder whether somebody changed the controller settings without telling him. If Cignetti and his staff can somehow eliminate that part of Hoover’s game, man, Indiana is going to rock it.

It helps that there’s plenty around him. Turbo Richard is the running back, which, quite frankly, feels like all the scouting information anybody should need. His name is Turbo Richard. He was born to gain 1,400 yards. Charlie Becker was nearly superhuman down the stretch last season, catching just about everything Fernando Mendoza threw in his general vicinity, and there’s so much more on this roster that I’m sure the Indiana fans in my life will immediately begin texting me about the six future All-Americans I neglected to mention.

Oregon completes this trio, and the Ducks are probably the most likely program in the country to do what Indiana did last season and win a national championship for the first time. Unlike Indiana before Cignetti arrived, Oregon has been sitting at the doorstep for years. Dan Lanning has built a formidable operation in Eugene, recruiting at an elite level, spending like an elite program and generally playing like one, with the only thing missing from the trophy cabinet being the one object everybody actually cares about.

The good news is Dante Moore came back. Moore could have entered the NFL draft and potentially heard his name called extremely early, but instead he returns for another season, giving Oregon one of the best quarterbacks in college football and another legitimate opportunity to finally break through. There is talent everywhere — Jordon Davison, Dakorien Moore, A’Mauri Washington, Bear Alexander, Matayo Uiagalelei and plenty more — but listing every great Oregon player eventually starts to miss the point. This season is about Lanning and whether he can finally finish the job.

A lot of resources have been poured into this operation, and last season’s blowout loss to Indiana in the CFP semifinal was simply the newest installment in Oregon’s long-running television series, Maybe Next Year. Lanning is by no means on the hot seat, nor should he be, but eventually, when you build something this good and come this close this many times, you have to become king of the hill at some point. Oregon has just about everything required to do it. Now it actually has to happen.

Playoff Dreams and Increasing Levels of Pressure

It’s around this point of the Big Ten preview that one truly realizes just how many teams are in this dang conference. Ohio State, Indiana and Oregon are the three I actually trust to win it, while USC, Michigan, Penn State, Washington and Iowa make up the next group down — teams I can absolutely envision reaching the College Football Playoff but need to see something from before I start planning any parades.

USC might have the most pressure of anyone in that group because it’s now or never for Lincoln Riley and the Trojans. Riley was supposed to turn USC back into USC, the version that collects Heisman winners like Pokémon cards and expects to compete for national championships instead of celebrating respectable seasons. Instead, the Trojans have spent much of his tenure hovering around the neighborhood of relevance without ever purchasing property there, despite having essentially every resource imaginable at their disposal.

Now Riley has pointed toward 2026 as the year when this whole thing is supposed to come together, which raises the rather obvious question of what exactly happened to all the other years. Eventually, USC has to produce something that justifies the time and money invested in Riley’s vision, and if another season ends with everybody shrugging their shoulders and wondering when the glory is coming, I’m not entirely sure what happens next. The incubator is sizzling in Los Angeles.

Michigan, meanwhile, has a new man on the headset in Kyle Whittingham, and I absolutely adore this hire. It felt like a coup. Whatever lingering remnants of the Jim Harbaugh era remained in Ann Arbor appear to have finally disappeared, and Whittingham brings precisely the kind of organizational stability Michigan could use after the chaos of the past few seasons.

Imagine what that guy can do with Michigan’s infrastructure. This is a program that needs winning football like James Bond needs his martini shaken instead of stirred. Sure, technically another option exists, but it just feels fundamentally wrong. As such, Whittingham doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel with the Wolverines. All that’s required of him is to stabilize the operation, maximize the enormous amount of talent — quarterback Bryce Underwood being chief among them — and resources available to him, and see how quickly Michigan can return to being what it was just several seasons ago.

Penn State begins its own new chapter with Matt Campbell, who has seemingly picked up Iowa State, stuffed the entire operation into the back of his truck and driven it to State College. Personally, I’m pessimistic that this is all going to work immediately, although plenty of people far smarter than me see a College Football Playoff appearance as not only possible but likely given how manageable the schedule appears to be. That feels a tad bit overzealous, in my opinion, but weirder circumstances have transpired in this wacky sport. Still, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Washington should be fascinating after narrowly avoiding disaster by getting Demond Williams Jr. back into the fold following his attempt to breach his NIL contract and scurry off to greener pastures. Everybody insists the resulting locker room fissures have been repaired, and perhaps they genuinely have, but that was such a bizarre saga that I’m curious whether any residual effects linger into the season. Either way, Jedd Fisch is too good of a coach for Washington to disappear. Whether this is a playoff team is another question entirely, but I’m considerably more bullish than bearish about what’s happening in Seattle.

And then there’s Iowa, beautiful and wonderful Iowa, still coached by Kirk Ferentz and still seemingly committed to discovering how few points a football team can score while technically winning the game. The ceiling might never reach Ohio State or Oregon because Iowa simply doesn’t possess the same talent advantages, but few programs understand themselves better. They are going to play defense, they are going to punt, they are going to score 17 points and you are going to laugh at them for three quarters before realizing they’re beating you 17-13. Then you’re going to sit in your car afterward wondering how you allowed this to happen.

Football perfection.

Good Football Teams With Major Question Marks Attached

Illinois belongs somewhere around this group, too, mostly because Bret Bielema has turned the Fighting Illini into exactly what you would imagine a Bret Bielema football team should be, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. Illinois football being legitimately relevant continues to be one of the sport’s more enjoyable developments, especially considering this is a place that has spent much of my lifetime being significantly more interesting on a basketball court than a football field. Luke Altmyer is gone, though, which introduces some uncertainty at quarterback, with Katin Houser the primary candidate to replace him. If the offense holds together, there’s no reason Illinois can’t continue being an enormous pain in everybody’s butt.

Nebraska is significantly more confusing. Matt Rhule is entering his fourth season, and somehow it still feels like the Cornhuskers are standing roughly where they were when he arrived, even if that isn’t entirely fair considering this program spent years treating a .500 record like an unattainable luxury item. There has been progress; it just hasn’t produced the quantum leap Nebraska fans have spent approximately 15 years waiting for.

At the very least, Anthony Colandrea should make everything entertaining. He is the quarterbacking equivalent of opening a mystery box. At any given moment, he can unleash a throw that makes your eyes pop out of your head. Three seconds later, he’ll throw the football directly to a linebacker. The duality of man is fascinating.

What?! There Are Still Eight Teams Left?

UCLA is significantly more exciting because Bob Chesney has arrived, bringing some desperately needed positive energy to the Rose Bowl after the failures of the past couple of seasons. Chesney was the man responsible for getting James Madison to the College Football Playoff, and while recreating that magic at UCLA is obviously a completely different assignment, the basic question is intriguing enough: If he can build that at James Madison, what can he eventually build with UCLA? I’m willing to find out.

So. Many. Teams. In. This. Conference.

Minnesota remains Minnesota under P.J. Fleck, which is mostly praise. Row the boat, win a respectable number of football games, upset somebody you weren’t supposed to beat and generally remain competent. I’d love to see the Gophers eventually take another step forward because Fleck has built one of the conference’s more reliable programs, but consistency in modern college football shouldn’t be dismissed simply because it isn’t particularly sexy.

Wisconsin might have the simplest equation in the entire conference. It’s now or never for Luke Fickell. Win, show some legitimate progress and perhaps this thing can finally start blossoming into what Wisconsin thought it was getting when it hired him. Lose, and everybody in Madison is going to start Googling “Wisconsin football coaching candidates” before Thanksgiving. There isn’t much middle ground left.

Maryland has always existed in a strange blind spot for me. Growing up in Texas, deep in Big 12 and SEC territory, the Terrapins were somewhere between Bigfoot and Delaware: I understood intellectually that they existed, but they rarely entered my daily life. Malik Washington gives me a reason to pay attention now, though, because Maryland has legitimate talent at quarterback, and if he’s firing on all cylinders, there’s enough here to make the Terrapins considerably more interesting than they usually are to me.

Northwestern, meanwhile, has a beautiful new stadium, is coming off a surprisingly competent season and now has Chip Kelly running the offense, which is a collection of words I never expected to type in that order. Chip Kelly? At Northwestern? College football has officially become somebody’s dynasty mode after six beers. Still, after everything this program has endured, perhaps Northwestern is actually becoming somewhat relevant again. What a concept.

Rutgers is much easier to understand. The offense was legitimately fun last season, while the defense sucked absolute cheeks, which tends to create problems when the basic objective of football is to score more points than the other team. The Scarlet Knights finished 4-8 despite that offensive success, so figuring out how to occasionally prevent the opposition from marching down the field would be a helpful development. Until then, I remain committed to one of college football’s timeless principles: always bet Rutgers overs.

Michigan State hired Pat Fitzgerald, which I’m not particularly sold on. Fitzgerald deserves plenty of credit for making Northwestern relevant for a long time, but the latter years of his tenure there weren’t exactly inspiring, and Michigan State needs somebody capable of dragging the Spartans out of the gutter rather than merely making them respectable. Maybe Fitzgerald proves me wrong, but this is one of the conference’s coaching hires that leaves me with considerably more questions than answers.

And Purdue? If Purdue ever becomes good at football again, please contact me immediately. I will probably be somewhere else watching another game.

So, Who Wins the Big Ten?

Ohio State.

I know, how adventurous of me. But sometimes the obvious answer is obvious for a reason. Julian Sayin, Jeremiah Smith, Bo Jackson, Ryan Day — it’s a great group capable of doing great things.

Indiana is obviously capable of doing it again, and at this point, doubting Curt Cignetti feels like touching the stove for the fourth consecutive time just to make sure it’s still hot. Oregon might have as much talent as anybody, too, and this could finally be the year Dan Lanning turns all those resources and all those almosts into a title. Or maybe somebody completely different — like Michigan or USC — rises up and plucks the title away from everybody else.

But Ohio State feels like the safest bet. There’s too much to love here for me to go anywhere else.

Which is why I’m having such a difficult time accepting that the 2026 Big 12 looks, dare I say, predictable.

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Texas Tech and BYU are the two obvious favorites, and the gap between those two and everybody else feels considerably larger than what we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in this conference. That doesn’t mean somebody won’t emerge from the giant pile of teams behind them — this is still the Big 12, after all — but there is at least a little more order entering the season than we’re used to. I don’t necessarily like it. I want my Big 12 to look like somebody dumped 16 teams into a washing machine, turned the dial to high and came back in December to see what survived.

Maybe we’ll get there eventually.

Texas Tech and BYU Have Separated Themselves

Texas Tech has essentially decided that being a plucky little program in Lubbock was no longer fulfilling enough, opened the checkbook and started constructing a roster like Steve Cohen discovering that Major League Baseball technically does not have a salary cap. It worked, too, unlike Cohen’s Mets experiment. Texas Tech won 12 games, captured its first Big 12 championship and made the College Football Playoff last season, which means we have officially moved beyond the point where the spending spree is some cute achievement. This is what Texas Tech is now. Winning the Big 12 is no longer some wild dream for a program that spent much of the post-Mike Leach era hanging around the middle of the conference. It’s the expectation.

Of course, because this is still Texas Tech and because God apparently enjoys college football storylines, the Red Raiders spent the offseason embroiled in the Brendan Sorsby gambling fiasco that ultimately left their prized transfer quarterback ineligible. That should be the sort of thing that completely derails a season before it begins, except I’m not convinced it will. Will Hammond was already considered a promising option before tearing his ACL last year, and Texas Tech has enough talent surrounding him — particularly on a defense that should hit people like a Ford F-350 barreling down I-27 — that I’m still perfectly comfortable calling the Red Raiders the best team in this conference. The quarterback situation lowers the ceiling a bit, but it doesn’t suddenly make everything else disappear.

BYU is considerably less theatrical, which is probably the most BYU thing imaginable. The Cougars just keep winning football games under Kalani Sitake, who has quietly turned into one of my favorite coaches in the entire sport and could probably convince me to run through a brick wall at 4 in the morning if he asked nicely enough. They’ve won double-digit games in consecutive seasons, reached Arlington last year and now return Bear Bachmeier after he somehow survived a freshman season that included six comeback victories. He still has to become a better passer, and I’m concerned about a receiving corps that doesn’t appear significantly better than the one he had last season, but BYU can hand the ball to LJ Martin and generally trust that Sitake will figure out the rest. That has become a pretty dependable formula.

Martin might be the biggest reason I’m willing to overlook some of the questions in the passing game. He ran for 1,305 yards, scored 12 touchdowns and won Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year last season, giving Bachmeier the sort of security blanket every young quarterback would love to have. Combine that with Bachmeier’s own ability to run, and BYU shouldn’t need him to turn into Patrick Mahomes overnight. The Cougars just need him to be a little better than he was as a freshman. If that happens, I have a difficult time imagining them not being involved in the championship race again.

The Giant “Yeah, I Could See It” Tier

This is where the Big 12 starts feeling like the Big 12 again.

Houston fascinates me because Willie Fritz has basically spent his entire coaching career walking into places, looking around and saying, “Yeah, I can fix this,” before proceeding to do exactly that. The Cougars went 10-3 last season after consecutive 4-8 campaigns, and although I’m not completely sold on Conner Weigman being the quarterback who takes them from fun story to Big 12 champion, five-star freshman Keisean Henderson is sitting behind him like the giant red button everyone in the building knows exists. Weigman was productive last season, accounting for 36 touchdowns, so this isn’t exactly a crisis situation. But Henderson is one of the most talented quarterbacks in the country, at least on paper, and every mediocre Weigman quarter is inevitably going to produce another few thousand people wondering when the kid gets his shot.

Utah and Kansas State are dealing with slightly different versions of the same problem: Two programs that have felt incredibly stable for years are suddenly moving forward without the coaches responsible for much of that stability. Kyle Whittingham finally left Utah after 21 seasons, only to resurface at Michigan after one of the stranger coaching carousels imaginable, and longtime assistant Morgan Scalley now gets the unenviable task of following him. Devon Dampier is back after scoring 34 touchdowns last season, but both lines have undergone significant changes and some important players and coaches followed Whittingham out the door. Utah has spent two decades feeling like the reliable dad of college football — sensible shoes, oil changed every 5,000 miles, probably owns a really nice pressure washer — and now we’re finding out what happens when somebody else gets the keys.

Kansas State’s transition feels a little less dramatic because Collin Klein is about as Kansas State as a human being can possibly be. He played there, nearly won the Heisman there, coached there and now returns to take over for Chris Klieman. Avery Johnson is also somehow still waiting for the breakout season people have been predicting for what feels like my entire adult life, and perhaps this is finally it. Johnson has started 25 games over the last two seasons, Klein knows exactly what Kansas State football is supposed to look like and the Wildcats conveniently avoid Texas Tech, BYU and Utah. If you wanted to talk yourself into Kansas State making it to Arlington, I wouldn’t stop you. I might even join you. I have made significantly worse preseason decisions.

TCU is more fascinating than trustworthy, which has basically become the program’s identity since that magical 2022 season. Josh Hoover is gone, Harvard transfer Jaden Craig takes over and new offensive coordinator Gordon Sammis arrives after running a UConn offense that protected the football and leaned considerably more heavily on the running game. Heck yeah! I’m not expecting Sonny Dykes to suddenly morph into Kirk Ferentz and start treating every forward pass like a federal offense, but a little more control probably wouldn’t hurt. Craig will still get plenty of opportunities to sling the ball around, and there is enough talent here for TCU to matter. Whether that means eight wins or a legitimate run at a championship is where I start having questions.

Arizona deserves considerably more respect than it seems to be getting after quietly going 9-4 last season. Noah Fifita is the most experienced quarterback in the conference, threw 29 touchdowns a year ago and gives the Wildcats something increasingly rare in modern college football: a quarterback who has been around long enough that fans don’t need an offseason flowchart to remember where he came from. Much of the roster around him has changed, particularly on defense, so I’m hesitant to put Arizona alongside Texas Tech and BYU. But having the right quarterback can cover up an awful lot of problems in college football, and Arizona most certainly has one.

Arizona State gets the benefit of the doubt almost entirely because Kenny Dillingham has earned it. The Sun Devils took a step backward after their magical 2024 campaign and now have to replace Sam Leavitt and Jordyn Tyson, but Dillingham turned down multiple high-level coaching offers to remain at his alma mater and already has a Big 12 championship sitting on his résumé. Cutter Boley becomes his latest quarterback project, and while I don’t know whether there’s enough around him for Arizona State to win the conference again, I’ve reached the point where dismissing a Dillingham team in August feels unnecessarily dangerous.

UCF keeps showing up on lists of potential surprise teams, and I don’t really know what to do with that information. Scott Frost’s reunion tour began with a 5-7 season, and although James Madison transfer Alonza Barnett III makes the Knights considerably more interesting after an impressive year that saw him score 38 touchdowns that helped the Dukes make the College Football Playoff, I’m not ready to start jumping to too many conclusions. Maybe Frost finally recreates some of the magic that made his first tenure so much fun and perhaps Barnett is exactly what this offense needed.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Oklahoma State Has Broken My Brain

My brain tells me to be responsible here. Oklahoma State went 1-11 last season. One and eleven!

Mike Gundy’s remarkable run in Stillwater ended with the entire building collapsing on top of itself, and Eric Morris has responded by essentially putting North Texas on a U-Haul and driving it three hours north. Drew Mestemaker came with him. Caleb Hawkins came with him. Wyatt Young came with him. Sixty transfers came with him. There are 89 new players on this roster, which is less of a rebuild and more of an episode of Flip or Flop.

And yet … I kind of love it.

Mestemaker led the country with 4,379 passing yards last season. Hawkins rushed for more than 1,200 yards. Young nearly reached 1,300 receiving yards. Morris knows quarterbacks and just built one of the most entertaining offenses in America at North Texas, so I’m fascinated by the idea of transplanting that operation into a Power Four program with considerably more resources. There are legitimate concerns, particularly because Mestemaker struggled against some of the better defenses he faced last season, and some of those defenses weren’t exactly the 1985 Bears. There is absolutely no logical reason I should be sitting here talking myself into the Cowboys as quickly as I am.

Surely nobody would be irresponsible enough to put Oklahoma State in a preseason ranking.

Wait.

I’m receiving word that I did exactly that in the inaugural College Football Corner Poll.

Crap.

I’m one of those people.

The “OK, I’ll See You Next Year” Tier

There are six teams left, and I would like to formally apologize in advance to whichever one inevitably wins eight or nine games and makes this entire section look ridiculous.

Baylor is probably the most interesting of the bunch because DJ Lagway gives Dave Aranda one final opportunity to turn things around. Lagway was one of the most talented quarterbacks in his recruiting class and provides the sort of upside that can completely change a season if everything clicks, but Aranda is 36-37 and has spent the years since Baylor’s 12-win 2021 campaign drifting further away from it. There isn’t much mystery surrounding the stakes. Baylor needs to be good, and if it isn’t, I have a difficult time imagining Aranda getting another opportunity to fix it.

Scott Satterfield is in a similar position at Cincinnati. The Bearcats finally reached a bowl last season, which qualifies as progress after winning eight games combined across Satterfield’s first two years, but they’ve also won just once after October during his tenure. That is not exactly the sort of trend that gets everyone excited about Year 4. Colorado, meanwhile, is trying to recover from a 3-9 season under Deion Sanders, and I genuinely have no idea what the long-term future of that entire experiment looks like if things go poorly again. Sanders has already taken Colorado from one win to nine and back down to three, which makes charting the trajectory of this program feel like watching somebody’s heart monitor.

Iowa State begins life after Matt Campbell with 84 new players, a sentence that should probably be enough to explain why I’m not particularly bullish on the Cyclones. Kansas finally has to figure out life after Jalon Daniels, whose college career lasted long enough that I’m pretty sure he once played against Nebraska in the old Big 12 North. And West Virginia is entering Year 2 of Rich Rodriguez’s second tenure in Morgantown, which still sounds like a sentence transported directly from 2007. Maybe one of those rebuilds moves faster than expected. I’m simply not betting on it.

The coaching situations might actually be more interesting than the football in this tier. Aranda and Satterfield are obvious candidates to be gone if things fall apart, and I wouldn’t completely rule out Sanders deciding he has had enough of the whole operation if Colorado endures another miserable season.

So, Who Wins the Big 12?

Everything in front of me says Texas Tech.

The Red Raiders have the roster, the defense, the recent proof of concept and the resources to make another run at the College Football Playoff. BYU is the team I trust most to stay on their heels because Sitake has built something incredibly stable in Provo, and Bachmeier becoming even marginally better as a passer could make the Cougars considerably more dangerous. Kansas State, Houston, Utah, Arizona, TCU and the rest of the giant “Yeah, I could see it” tier all have reasonable paths if something breaks their way.

But trying to confidently predict the Big 12 is a little like leaving a toddler alone in a room with a Sharpie. You know what should happen. That has very little bearing on what you’re going to find when you come back.

Read More from The Football Corner

Not because I particularly dislike any specific institution in the conference — although SMU has been known to grind my gears from time to time — but because the entire league goes against so much of what made college football great for so many years. Its greatest crime is lying directly to our faces. The “Atlantic Coast Conference” possesses schools in Berkeley, California, and Dallas, Texas, and Notre Dame gets to hang around for basically everything except football because apparently geography and full conference membership are both optional concepts now.

The ACC isn’t solely responsible for destroying regionality, obviously. The SEC shook things up by taking Texas and Oklahoma, while the Big Ten essentially delivered the death knell to the Pac-12 by grabbing USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington. The ACC was reacting to a sport that had already gone mad, but that doesn’t make the stench any less stinky. Then last season it managed to produce a conference championship game where 7-5 Duke won the whole dang thing while Miami sat at home because the tiebreakers were so messed up that practically nobody understood what was happening.

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Again, an abomination.

Unfortunately for my hopes of spending the next couple thousand words explaining a thrilling championship race, the actual football might be considerably less complicated. Miami is the best team in the ACC by a mile, and I genuinely think I’d pick the Hurricanes to reach the SEC Championship Game if somebody accidentally moved them into that conference tomorrow. Louisville could challenge. SMU could challenge. Clemson is still lurking around because it’s Clemson. But if Miami plays anything close to its best football, I have a difficult time seeing anyone in this league beating it.

Miami Is in a League of Its Own

Mario Cristobal deserves significantly more credit than he gets for what he’s built in Coral Gables. The clock-management jokes were deserved and some of the losses along the way were downright ridiculous, but anybody who still doubts whether Cristobal can build a football team must’ve been in a coma during December and January. Miami reached the national championship game last season, has won double-digit games in consecutive years and now might have somehow upgraded at quarterback by replacing Carson Beck with Darian Mensah.

There’s also Malachi Toney, who caught 109 passes as a freshman and already looks like one of the most terrifying offensive players in America. Mensah is walking into a situation where he shouldn’t have to become Superman every Saturday, and that’s probably the scariest part about this entire operation. Miami has recruited at an elite level under Cristobal, has proven it can win at the highest level and now gets one of the best quarterbacks in the country to control the joysticks on the whole thing. The defense lost some spectacular talent, so I don’t expect the Hurricanes to simply stroll onto the field and beat everybody by 30, but the talent advantage over most of this conference is difficult to ignore.

This is also still Miami, which means an inexplicable loss to an unranked team is always sitting somewhere in the background like the shark in Jaws. You know it’s probably coming. You just don’t know exactly when it’s going to appear. That’s really the biggest thing keeping me from treating the ACC race like a foregone conclusion, because Miami is kind of like a toddler with an expensive vase; it just knows how to ruin a good thing.

There’s Got to Be Somebody Else, Right?

Louisville is probably where I’d start. Jeff Brohm has quietly won 28 games in three seasons at his alma mater, and the Cardinals won nine games last season despite three of their four losses coming when star running back Isaac Brown was injured. Ohio State transfer Lincoln Kienholz takes over at quarterback, and although he has barely played meaningful college football, he was reportedly close to edging out Julian Sayin last year. We all know how that went, though.

The schedule also looks like somebody at the ACC office personally apologized to Louisville for something. The Cardinals don’t play Miami, Clemson or Virginia, and SMU comes to town Sept. 19. Beat the Mustangs and suddenly Louisville has a remarkably clean path toward Charlotte.

SMU has a similar argument and more certainty at quarterback with Kevin Jennings returning for his third season as the starter. Jennings threw for 3,641 yards and 26 touchdowns last year, but he also tossed 13 interceptions, and that inconsistency basically sums up my feelings about the Mustangs. They beat Clemson, Louisville and Miami last season, then lost at Cal with a spot in the ACC Championship Game essentially sitting on the table. Rhett Lashlee is a really good coach and another Playoff run is absolutely possible. I’m just not ready to trust SMU with anything of significant emotional value.

There’s also Clemson, I guess.

Dabo Swinney is one of the best coaches of his generation, but last year’s 7-6 campaign not only came after I picked Clemson to win the national title, it was also the Tigers’ worst season since 2010. The fact that it happened with — checks notes — NINE players who were eventually selected in the NFL Draft makes the whole thing considerably more concerning. Christopher Vizzina will most likely finally get his opportunity under center and Clemson sill recruits well enough that a resurgence wouldn’t be particularly all that shocking.

The Tigers open at LSU. Win that and I’ll reconsider everything. Until then, I’ll remain doubtful.

I Just Like Y’all Because of the Vibes

Virginia Tech might be my favorite non-Miami storyline because James Franklin’s attempt to resucitate the Hokies is just a wonderful yarn I can’t wait to watch unfurl. Penn State fired a coach who won 104 games and reached the College Football Playoff semifinal, and Virginia Tech responded by handing him the keys to a program that hasn’t felt important since, well, a long time ago. Ethan Grunkemeyer followed Franklin from Penn State after showing some promise in the past, and while I don’t necessarily believe the Hokies are ready to win the ACC immediately, the idea of meaningful November football returning to Lane Stadium makes the hair on the back of neck stand up.

Georgia Tech gives me similarly good vibes because Brent Key looks like the sort of coach who should be standing on the sideline in a hard hat while somebody pours concrete behind him. The Yellow Jackets started 8-0 last season before collapsing down the stretch, and replacing Haynes King with Alberto Mendoza — younger brother of Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza — will change the offense considerably. Key’s team should remain physical and annoying enough to ruin somebody’s Saturday at any given moment.

Meanwhile, Virginia is coming off an 11-win year that practically nobody saw coming, and Pitt remains the reliably weird operation it has become under Pat Narduzzi. Both could matter, or they could be absolute dumpster fires. Either way, neither makes me nearly as excited or interests me as much as Cal.

Oh, Cal.

I could talk about Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele for hours. He threw for 3,454 yards as a freshman while playing in an offense that asked him to do an absurd amount of work, and the fact that he stayed in Berkeley rather than taking whatever enormous pile of money somebody surely would’ve offered him makes me like him even more. Tosh Lupoi being the coach that has control of the ship makes me even more intrigued, as he’s surrounded Sagapolutele with more experience. Cal might not win the ACC, but I’ve irrationally convinced myself that JKS will win the Heisman.

Everything Else Is Weird

Mike Norvell went 13-0 at Florida State three seasons ago. Man, that feels like an eternity ago.

I feel like that needs to be stated because what has happened since makes absolutely no sense. The Seminoles are 7-17 over the last two seasons, an Norvell is somehow still standing largely because firing him would require the university to empty the coffers to such an exhubiant degree that keeping him is the only option.

Can FSU compete in 2026? Well, the program brought in 23 transfers, with quarterback Ashton Daniels being at the forefront. Duce Robinson is an absolute monster at receiver, so there should be enough talent for the Seminoles to recover — at least slightly. But Norvell needs to win some dang football games. If Florida State tumbles early, the vibes in Tallahassee — which are already underwater — could reach Chernobyl levels before Halloween.

North Carolina might somehow be even more combustible than the operation in the Florida panhandle. Why? Well, Bill Belichick, of course!

Yes, he’s still here.

Year 1 ended 4-8 with multiple embarrassing results stymying any of the positive offseason momentum the hire of Belichick generated. The toxic fumes have continued into 2026. Bobby Petrino is the offensive coordinator, a character in his own right. General manager Mike Lombari is on admistrative leave. (Don’t ask.) And Billy Edwards Jr. is the quarterback and is also a million years old.

The Tar Heels open against TCU in Ireland, and I genuinely believe that if they lose that game in poor fashion then the reality television cameras need to be on the tarmac when UNC arrives back stateside. This is must-watch television right now — imagine if the vibes are absolutely in the toilet after an overseas trip?

Everybody Else… Is Boring

NC State avoids Miami, Clemson and SMU and returns CJ Bailey, giving Dave Doeren another opportunity to finally reach the ACC Championship Game after 13 seasons in Raleigh. Wake Forest quietly won nine games last season, Syracuse has some hope if Steve Angeli returns healthy from his Achilles injury and Duke gets to defend the most improbable conference championship imaginable without Mensah, who is now playing for the team the Blue Devils helped keep out of the title game.

Stanford is attempting yet another reboot while Andrew Luck oversees the football operation. Boston College went 2-10 and lost several of its best players to the portal.

I wish these teams the best.

So, Who Wins the ACC?

Miami.

There. It’s been decided.

That was easy.

Read More from The Football Corner

No, the trend of conference realignment began way before those schools decided that chasing the dollar signs was a better deal than keeping the sport happy and healthy in the long run. Just think back over the last 20 years. Texas A&M and Missouri made the same decision that Texas and OU did, bolting to the SEC following the 2011 campaign. The same goes for schools like Rutgers, Maryland, Nebraska and Colorado — all of them decided that sticking in the place they used to be wasn’t good enough. But it goes back way, way further than that. As Bill Connelly exposited in his book Forward Progress, conference shakeups have been a mainstay of college football for almost 100 years.

Now we live in the era of superconferences. Eighteen teams reside in the Big Ten. There are 17 schools in the ACC, several of which don’t subscribe to the whole “Atlantic Coast” part of the conference (I’m looking at you, Cal, Stanford and SMU). There are 16 teams each in both the Big 12 and SEC, too, which means four conferences that were never really designed to house this many sides are now attempting to figure out how to create schedules that are simultaneously fair, entertaining, lucrative and somehow capable of maintaining rivalries that existed long before television executives started deciding who should play whom. It’s a mess, and all these leagues are way too bloated, making scheduling an absolute nightmare for everybody.

Back in the day, a nice, clean round-robin slate was all that was necessary. You played everybody, everybody played you and by the end of the year everybody was pleased (except those who lost, of course). Now, everybody is up in arms about strength of schedule compared to their opposition, wondering why one team got to avoid three of the best programs in the league while another was sent through a meat grinder, none more so than the Southeastern Conference.

For the first time in its modern scheduling era, the SEC will be playing nine conference games in 2026. This catches the league up to the rest of its competitors, as the Big Ten has been playing nine games against itself since 2016, while the Big 12 has done the same since 2012. The ACC is the only outlier of the bunch, as its 17-team mega-league requires it to do some massive maneuvering to make everything equal. It has failed spectacularly at doing so, but that is a conversation for another time because attempting to explain the ACC’s scheduling model would just confuse everybody way too much.

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The College Football Playoff kicked off last night in Norman, with the No. 9 Alabama Crimson Tide squaring off against the No. 8 Oklahoma Sooners in a rematch of an entertaining game the two teams played back in Tuscaloosa in mid-November. The matchup had everything a sports fan could want from a playoff atmosphere: the crowd was amped, the football was fun, and the final result felt earned.

In the end, Alabama — which has endured an up-and-down season that’s been more down than up in recent weeks — stormed back from a 17-point deficit to claim a 34-24 victory over the Sooners. With the win, the Crimson Tide advance to the Rose Bowl (presented by Prudential, which is gross, if you ask me. Remember when the sanctity of the sport was protected from such ludicrous sponsors? Of course, the Pop-Tarts Bowl is an exception here. Anyway, sigh.) to face the No. 1-seeded Indiana Hoosiers.

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After today, The Saturday Watchlist will officially be hitting the hay for a while.

That’s obviously sad, but as we embark on the final big-time Saturday of the season, let’s just enjoy the college football we have in front of us. Because while some might choose to be upset at this all coming to an end, I’m going to go down the path of happiness.

There are five FBS college football games today — all of them conference championships. It starts in the morning with the Big 12 and BYU-Texas Tech. The winner secures a berth to the College Football Playoff, of course, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. You see, if Texas Tech wins, then BYU is most likely out and the Big 12 will have just one representative in the CFP. If BYU wins, however, then both it and Texas Tech will go.

There’s also the SEC Championship Game between Georgia and Alabama in the afternoon. Some are saying that Alabama — which is ranked No. 9 coming into the day, could drop out of the CFP if it loses. I’ll believe that when I see it. There’s just no way that the selection committee would drop the SEC runner-up out of the playoff. Right?

The final act of the day could be the most entertaining of all with the Big Ten Championship and the ACC Championship. It’s a battle between No. 1 and No. 2 in Indianapolis for the right to claim the Big Ten’s most coveted prize. That on its face isn’t the most surprising thing in the world, but the fact that one of those teams is Indiana — a school that usually doesn’t care all that much about football — is truly astounding. I still haven’t wrapped my head around the fact that the Hoosiers are actually good at this sport now.

But as you’re watching Indiana-Ohio State, remember that 7-5 Duke is playing Virginia for a chance to win the ACC. The playoff implications are somewhat simple: if Virginia wins, it’ll go to the CFP as one of the five highest ranked conference champions. If Duke wins, however, the situation gets a little muddier. There’s a shot that the selection committee could choose to include what would be an 8-5 Duke as one its highest ranked conference champions, but the more likely scenario is that it would put No. 25 James Madison — which won the Sun Belt last night — in instead. So, yeah, there’s a chance that no ACC team enters the field come selection day tomorrow morning.

That’s the slate! And that’s pretty much the watchlist. It should be a fun day.

The final Saturday of the college football regular season is here. That’s obviously bittersweet, but the good news is that the day is filled with intense rivalry matchups that will fill all our hearts with joy — so long as your favorite team wins, of course.

Yesterday we saw several good rivalry contests like the Egg Bowl (Ole Miss-Mississippi State), Good Old Fashioned Hate (Georgia-Georgia Tech), and the Lone Star Showdown (Texas A&M-Texas). All that continues today with The Game (Ohio State-Michigan), the Iron Bowl (Alabama-Auburn), and so much more. It should be a great time.

Today’s Saturday Watchlist is no where near an exhaustive list. There are tons of rivalry games to choose from today — these are just the ones I have pegged as potential fun games. If your favorite team isn’t listed, I promise that I mean no slight.

Here’s The Saturday Watchlist for November 29, 2025.

Early Window

Primary Screen: No. 1 Ohio State at No. 15 Michigan - 11 a.m. - FOX
Secondary Screen: No. 12 Miami at No. 22 Pittsburgh - 11 a.m. - ABC
Tertiary Screen: Clemson at South Carolina - 11 a.m. - SEC Network

Also worth tracking:
Houston at Baylor - 11 a.m. - TNT
Kentucky at Louisville - 11 a.m. - ACC Network
No. 5 Texas Tech at West Virginia - 11 a.m. - ESPN

Afternoon Window

Primary Screen: No. 14 Vanderbilt at No. 19 Tennessee - 2:30 p.m. - ESPN
Secondary Screen: No. 6 Oregon at Washington - 2:30 p.m. - CBS
Tertiary Screen: Cincinnati at TCU - 2:30 p.m. - FOX

Also worth tracking:
Missouri at Arkansas - 2:30 p.m. - SEC Network
Florida State at Florida - 3:30 p.m. - ESPN2

Evening Window

Primary Screen: No. 10 Alabama at Auburn - 6:30 p.m. - ABC
Secondary Screen: Virginia Tech at No. 18 Virginia - 6 p.m. - ESPN
Tertiary Screen: No. 21 SMU at California - 7 p.m. - ESPN2

Also worth tracking:
UCLA at No. 17 USC - 6:30 p.m. - NBC
Northwestern at Illinois - 6:30 p.m. - FOX
North Carolina at NC State - 6:30 p.m. - ACC Network

Late Window

Primary Screen: No. 9 Notre Dame at Stanford - 9:30 p.m. - ESPN

Happy Black Friday! Everyone’s aware that watching the NFL on Thanksgiving is one of the most rewarding sports days on the calendar. What people don’t know is that the Friday after usually presents a good amount of sports action as well.

That’s the case today, as there’s a ton of college football to watch. It all starts with the Egg Bowl between Ole Miss and Mississippi State in the early window. Should Ole Miss win, it’ll essentially clinch its spot in the College Football Playoff. If it loses, though, then not only would it potentially fall out of the playoff, but it could also lose its head coach to Baton Rouge or Gainesville. The stakes are, well, high.

Then there’s Georgia’s battle with Georgia Tech in the afternoon in Atlanta. This game was an epic back-and-forth affair a season ago, with the Bulldogs ultimately coming out on top. While that’s once again the expected result today, there’s always a chance that Haynes King completely takes over and the Yellow Jackets pull off a stunner.

The finale to the day is the Lone Star Showdown between Texas and Texas A&M. There are very few college football games that get me as amped as this one. For the Longhorns, their slim CFP hopes hang in the balance, while the Aggies need to win to make the SEC Championship Game next weekend. There’s also the fact that the two schools hate each other’s guts, which adds in that tension that makes college football so awesome.

So, I hope you all have a great day and that this Friday watchlist provides you with the necessary information about how to navigate your day!

Early Window

Primary Screen: No. 7 Ole Miss at Mississippi State - 11 a.m. - ABC
Secondary Screen: Iowa at Nebraska - 11 a.m. - CBS
Tertiary Screen: No. 13 Utah at Kansas - 11 a.m. - ESPN

Also worth tracking:
Ohio at Buffalo - 11 a.m. - ESPNU
Kent State at Northern Illinois - 11 a.m. - CBS Sports Network

Afternoon Window

Primary Screen: No. 4 Georgia at No. 23 Georgia Tech - 2:30 p.m. - ABC
Secondary Screen: Temple at North Texas - 2:30 p.m. - ESPN
Tertiary Screen: San Diego State at New Mexico - 2:30 p.m. - CBS Sports Network

Also worth tracking:
Chicago Bears at Philadelphia Eagles - 2 p.m. - Prime Video

Evening Window

Primary Screen: No. 3 Texas A&M at No. 16 Texas - 6:30 p.m. - ABC
Secondary Screen: No. 25 Arizona at No. 20 Arizona State - 8 p.m. - FOX
Tertiary Screen: No. 2 Indiana at Purdue - 6:30 p.m. - NBC

Happy Thanksgiving week, everybody!

I hope that you all are planning on having wonderful days with your family, friends, acquaintances, and perhaps even enemies this fine week. It’s truly a wonderful time of the year, filled with laughter, joy and, most importantly, football.

As we gear up for the final week of college football’s regular season — I can’t believe it’s already here — it’s time to release the last D Poll before the postseason starts. That means that this iteration of the ranking is pretty important, because this will be the final D Poll that’s based solely on vibes and feelings. Starting next week, it’ll be solely based on resumé, and which teams I believe are most deserving.

That’s a problem for later, though, so let’s get into the D Poll for Week 14. Just like with last night’s College Football Playoff rankings, there aren’t a ton of changes in the top 15. Oregon jumping up a couple of spots after its big win over USC is probably the most notable change of the contending teams.

The Group of 6 has several representatives in the ranking, with North Texas leading the poll at No. 14.

Hold on.

Let’s talk about that for a second.

It was announced yesterday that Oklahoma State had hired North Texas head coach Eric Morris. Yes, that’s right. Three days before the Mean Green’s final game of the season, and just one week before the team potentially played in a conference championship game that would be for a spot in the College Football Playoff, the head coach of the team bolted for another gig. There isn’t time right now for me to rant about the preposterous nature of the college football calendar, but just know that I think it’s ridiculous that schools and coaches feel the need — and rightfully so — to pursue alternative options during the season because of how the calendar is set up.

Anyway, Morris is a spectacular hire for the Cowboys, but this is definitely a net negative for North Texas’ position in the D Poll. Full transparency: I was planning on vaulting UNT up into the top 10 prior to the news breaking yesterday. Now that the team is without a head coach (yes, he’s allegedly coaching the rest of the season, but does that even really matter?), the vibes in Denton are way worse than they were just 48 hours ago. Folks are scared that this will derail what has been a very special campaign. So, I’ve knocked them down a peg — at least from where I originally planned to put them.

For the rest of the D Poll, Arizona jumps all the way to No. 19 after curb-stomping Baylor, which sets up a ranked-on-ranked Territorial Cup matchup between the Wildcats and Arizona State this Black Friday.

Miami is above Notre Dame, which is just the correct thing to do. Listen, I love Notre Dame’s fun new logos that they put out at the beginning of the season more than anybody — I’m just such a sucker for a leprechaun carrying a football — but Miami literally beat the Fighting Irish in Week 1 of the season, and I just can’t ignore that.

UConn is still here despite Jim Mora bolting for the Colorado State job yesterday evening. I don’t really care. The Huskies are good at football, and that’s all that matters.

Enough about UConn, though. I’m sure they’re getting ready for some big basketball game or something (it is Feast Week, after all). Here’s the D Poll for Week 14.

1. Ohio State (NM)

Week 12 result: 42-9 win vs. Rutgers

2. Indiana (NM)

Week 12 result: BYE

3. Georgia (NM)

Week 12 result: 35-3 win vs. Charlotte

4. Texas A&M (NM)

Week 12 result: 48-0 win vs. Samford

5. Texas Tech (NM)

Week 12 result: BYE

6. Oregon (+2)

Week 12 result: 42-27 win vs. USC

7. Ole Miss (NM)

Week 12 result: BYE

8. Oklahoma (-2)

Week 12 result: 17-6 win vs. Missouri

9. BYU (NM)

Week 12 result: 26-14 win at Cincinnati

10. Miami (NM)

Week 12 result: 34-17 win at Virginia Tech

11. Notre Dame (NM)

Week 12 result: 70-7 win vs. Syracuse

12. Alabama (NM)

Week 12 result: 56-0 win vs. Eastern Illinois

13. Utah (NM)

Week 12 result: 51-47 win vs. Kansas State

14. North Texas (NM)

Week 12 result: 56-24 win at Rice

15. Vanderbilt (+2)

Week 12 result: 45-17 win vs. Kentucky

16. Tulane (+2)

Week 12 result: 37-13 win at Temple

17. Michigan (+2)

Week 12 result: 45-20 win at Maryland

18. James Madison (+3)

Week 12 result: 24-20 win vs. Washington State

19. Arizona (NR)

Week 12 result: 41-17 win vs. Baylor

20. Arizona State (NR)

Week 12 result: 42-17 win at Colorado

21. Texas (+3)

Week 12 result: 52-37 win vs. Arkansas

22. Pittsburgh (NR)

Week 12 result: 42-28 win at Georgia Tech

23. UConn (+2)

Week 12 result: 48-45 win at Florida Atlantic

24. Virginia (-4)

Week 12 result: BYE

25. USC (-9)

Week 12 result: 42-27 loss at Oregon

When I first glanced at this weekend’s slate of games, I started to doze off. That’s right — the biggest college football fan a lot of you all probably know almost fell asleep when he saw what was on the table for today.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some games that catch the eye this wonderful Saturday. USC’s trip up north to face Oregon is definitely something that’ll have my attention. BYU has an important conference matchup with Cincinnati that could have a seismic impact on which team makes it to the Big 12 Championship Game. There’s also Arkansas’ potential upset big in Austin against Texas, although I’d peg that one as extremely unlikely.

But the rest. . . yeah, there’s not much there. Even the other ranked-on-ranked game of the day — No. 22 Missouri at No. 8 Oklahoma — isn’t all that intriguing due to the fact that 1) Missouri’s starting quarterback is probably not going to play, and 2) Missouri shouldn’t even be ranked in the first place.

So, if you watch college football today, then you’re a real fan.

For me, I’ll personally be in attendance for TCU-Houston, which is a game that might’ve had some intrigue a couple weeks ago but is now not anything particularly exciting. The only narrative coming out of it is whether the Horned Frogs are going to let go of head coach Sonny Dykes or not. I presume the answer to that question will be based on how good the team performs. Nonetheless, the fan sentiment surrounding the coaching staff in Fort Worth is anything but pleasant at the moment. If you don’t believe me, just search “Sonny Dykes” on Twitter — you’re sure to have a swell time.

Alright, let’s get to today’s watchlist. If you’re new here, The Saturday Watchlist is my personal repository for every game I plan to watch today. If a game isn’t listed below, then I don’t plan on watching it live. That doesn’t mean I don’t hold the Constitutional right to pivot should I so choose, but it’s unlikely given how exhaustive this list is.

Here’s The Saturday Watchlist for November 22, 2025. Maybe there’ll be a good game or two in here. I don’t know.

Early Window

Primary Screen: No. 22 Missouri at No. 8 Oklahoma - 11 a.m. - ABC
Secondary Screen: Louisville at SMU - 11 a.m. - ESPN2
Tertiary Screen: Baylor at Arizona - 12 p.m. - TNT

Also worth tracking:
No. 13 Miami at Virginia Tech - 11 a.m. - ESPN
Kansas at Iowa State - 11 a.m. - FS1

Afternoon Window

Primary Screen: No. 15 USC at No. 7 Oregon - 2:30 p.m. - CBS
Secondary Screen: Arkansas at No. 17 Texas - 2:30 p.m. - ABC
Tertiary Screen: Kansas State at No. 12 Utah - 3 p.m. - ESPN2

Also worth tracking:
Duke at North Carolina - 2:30 p.m. - ACC Network
TCU at No. 23 Houston - 3 p.m. - FOX

Evening Window

Primary Screen: No. 11 BYU at Cincinnati - 7 p.m. - FOX
Secondary Screen: No. 20 Tennessee at Florida - 6:30 p.m. - ABC
Tertiary Screen: Pitt at No. 16 Georgia Tech - 6 p.m. - ESPN

Also worth tracking:
California at Stanford - 6:30 p.m. - ACC Network
Nebraska at Penn State - 6 p.m. - NBC

Late Window

Primary Screen: Washington at UCLA - 9:30 p.m. - NBC