As we creep deeper into the offseason, you as readers will have to let me know what kind of column you want this to become. Because right now the questions are beginning to diverge into two distinct buckets.
Do you want more of: “How is my team going to look this year?” “Who are some sleeper College Football Playoff contenders?” “Who fared the best in the transfer portal?”
Or …
EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS SPORT IS FALLING TO PIECES! THERE’S A NEW LAWSUIT EVERY OTHER DAY! WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO????
Because both seem relevant.
Let’s say that next year’s Playoff doesn’t include a single team that made it this year. 1) Who would you be most and least surprised to miss it among the Power 4 teams? 2) Who are the 12 you are picking? — Aaron H.
Let this amazing question be a model for everyone else. It checks all the boxes: Creative, concise and great conversation fodder. Well done, Aaron!
I would be most surprised if Ohio State misses, mostly because the Buckeyes haven’t won fewer than 10 regular-season games in a full season since 2011, and a 10-2 Ohio State team is getting in. And, well, they have Julian Sayin, Jeremiah Smith, Bo Jackson …
I have Oregon at No. 1, Ohio State No. 2 in my early Top 25, so either of them imploding seems unlikely as of this moment. Moreover, the Buckeyes became the sport’s safest annual bet for title contention once Nick Saban retired at Alabama.
I would be least surprised if Ole Miss misses, because while Pete Golding did a great job holding that team together well enough to make its Playoff run, we really have no idea how he’ll fare with a remade staff (John David Baker replaces Charlie Weis Jr. as offensive coordinator) and possibly no Trinidad Chambliss.
Close runner-up on this one: Alabama.
As for the entirely new 12, this is going to be an almost complete crapshoot, but here goes (in alphabetical order):
• Boise State• BYU• Florida• Louisville• LSU• Michigan• Minnesota (Bruce talked me into this one)• Notre Dame• Oklahoma State (this year’s 2024 Indiana!)• Texas• USC• Washington
Tennessee QB Joey Aguilar just applied for what appears to be his eighth year of football. Eighth! When does this end? How does the NCAA, which has admittedly made numerous horrible decisions, finally get some stability in areas such as this? — Lukas F.
The short answer is: The NCAA is screwed. We are witnessing opportunistic attorneys, rule-bending coaches/athletic directors and friendly local judges tear down some of the most basic tenets of the entire model.
There is no great injustice to be rectified with Joey Aguilar, who, unlike other seventh/eighth-year senior types (who I usually celebrate), has not missed even one season to injury. In fact, he has already played five seasons of college football and is now seeking a sixth. Here is his timeline:
2019: Enrolled at a junior college, redshirted
2020: No season due to COVID
2021: Enrolls at a second juco, plays 10 games (redshirt freshman season)
2022: Same juco, plays six games (sophomore season)
2023: Appalachian State, plays 14 games (junior season)
2024: Appalachian State, plays 11 games (senior season)
At this point, he would have been out of eligibility, but thanks to the NCAA’s blanket waiver following Diego Pavia’s injunction, he gets back one of the juco seasons.
2025: Tennessee, plays 13 games (second senior season)
But now, Aguilar is making the case that no juco seasons should count against his eligibility clock. (So is Pavia in a separate suit, though he’s not coming back.)
And here’s guessing the … Chancery Court of Knox County, Tennessee, will agree with him.
While former juco players getting extra years of football eligibility is not on the same level of crisis as a former NBA player returning to college, there would definitely be ramifications. If I’m a Power 4 coach, why would I bother recruiting and developing all but the most obvious high-school prospects? Let them go to juco for a few years, bulk up, improve their skills, and you still get them for a full four years.
Truly, no one wants this.
The NCAA and P4 desperately need the antitrust exemption they’ve been seeking from Congress so they can set and enforce their own rules. But they need to change their strategy if they want anything to happen immediately. While the SCORE Act is most associated with the need for NIL regulations, the bill seeks to ban college athletes from ever becoming employees, which will never gain bipartisan support. People behind the scenes realize this but don’t yet want to accept it.
They need to propose a narrower bill that addresses urgent but noncontroversial issues, such as eligibility rules and transfer restrictions. Get that passed ASAP so you can stop the never-ending lawsuits. Then circle back to the deeper, existential stuff.
Or, you know, continue on the current path where a 35-year-old Joey Aguilar is starting for his 10th school.
What does Michigan look like now that the portal season is mostly over? Or is Michigan one of those “Who knows, until we see what Kyle Whittingham can do with those teams” that could be anywhere between Playoff team and an afterthought? — Frederick C.
Whittingham was not handed an empty cupboard by any means, and he’s only upgraded the roster since he got there. Obviously, we’re all curious to see what he and OC Jason Beck can do with QB Bryce Underwood, who showed flashes of his five-star talent as a freshman but was not particularly productive (2,428 yards, 11 TDs, 9 INTs). But, of course, now we know just how dysfunctional Michigan’s coaching situation was at the time. Whittingham/Beck should mark a considerable upgrade from Sherrone Moore/Chip Lindsey.
Also, Underwood’s supporting cast should be stronger, between returning skill guys Jordan Marshall and Andrew Marsh, incoming five-star running back Savion Hiter and imports such as Utah tight end JJ Buchanan and Oklahoma running back Taylor Tatum.
Michigan lost more key guys up front on defense, though Whittingham got a big win when stud pass-rusher John Henry Daley followed him to Ann Arbor. Most importantly on this side of the ball, though: Jay Hill is an excellent defensive coordinator who worked with Whittingham for many years at Utah before becoming head coach at Weber State, and, more recently, as the defensive coordinator at BYU. Quite the contrast from the miscast Wink Martindale last season.
It feels like Michigan finally has some adults in the room running the program. But, of course, that doesn’t guarantee the holdover Moore guys will take to Whittingham and his coordinators. The Wolverines should contend for the Playoff, though. If they become an afterthought before November, then something went terribly wrong.
Kyle Whittingham should put Michigan in a position to make the Playoff. (Chris Gardner/ Getty Images)
Bob Chesney is at UCLA games making predictions like, “We’re about to win a Big Ten championship!” On a scale of 0 -10, where zero is never and 10 is “going to happen next season,” what do you think the chances are that his prediction comes true? — John H.
We live in a post-Curt Cignetti world now, where the baseline answer to a question like this one will never again be “0.” Heck, I’d probably set the baseline at 4 and go from there. Maybe a 6?
Chesney has exactly the kind of track record I want in a head coach, and not just because he succeeded Cignetti at James Madison. He’s 48 and already has 16 years of head-coaching experience. He won in Division III (at Salve Regina, which I’ve only heard of from Chesney’s Wikipedia page), Division II (Assumption College), FCS (Holy Cross) and G5 (JMU). There’s no reason to think that won’t continue now that he’s ascended to the P4.
But Chesney could be the greatest football coach in the history of the world and he’d still have a ceiling if UCLA, as an institution, continues to operate as it has over the past 10-20 years.
Cignetti deserves all the credit and then some for his Indiana turnaround, but he also enjoyed the benefits of a well-run, well-resourced athletic department and a president who went all in on football in 2024. Staff salaries, NIL spend, etc., were all in the upper half of the Big Ten even before football’s breakthrough.
UCLA’s finances are, to be blunt, a mess. Athletics ran a $50 million deficit in 2024 alone, a year before rev-share kicked in, and $219 million over six years. There was next to no football booster funding for NIL, and apathy among fans and low ticket sales haven’t helped. After Chip Kelly left in early 2024, AD Martin Jarmond promoted DeShaun Foster mostly to save money. That blew up spectacularly.
This time, he and a search committee took their time and landed a highly qualified coach in Chesney while paying him a modest (by Big Ten standards) $6.75 million a year. Perhaps most importantly for UCLA, its president, Julio Frenk, came from Miami, where he and his administration led the flashy quest to land Mario Cristobal and went on a massive football spending spree. That surely helped attract Chesney.
All things considered, UCLA is in good hands, and a Big Ten title seems more realistic than it did a couple of years ago. I just wouldn’t expect it to happen in two years.
Stew, as a Miami fan I was very happy to see my team get so close to a national championship. But as a college football fan, I’m a bit torn. If the Playoff system we have in place allows a team that lost to middling Louisville and SMU to get that close to winning the championship, is this really an optimal way to determine the best team? — Christian F.
If the goal of a Playoff is to identify the best team over the course of the entire season, then we probably should have left it at four. Where you may get one mulligan, like 2024 Notre Dame, but not two, like 2024 Ohio State and 2025 Miami. Of course, there’s no way to be certain the committee didn’t still leave out the best team, but when you look back at the four-team era, those four teams fell into place more often than not. (Yeah, yeah, 2023 FSU.)
Now that we’re at 12, we just have to accept that there are going to be teams that get in that had some clunkers along the way. But if a team gets hot at the right time, the Playoff gives everybody a reset, especially those that go three or four weeks between games before the first one. Though clearly, Indiana this year didn’t need one.
This, of course, is the case with almost every other major sport that has a single-elimination postseason tournament. We’ve long since become conditioned to accept that sometimes March Madness ends with a No. 4 seed playing a No. 5 seed in the championship, or the last wild card team to make it into the NFL playoffs makes it to the Super Bowl.
But it’s a novel concept in college football, and I realize not everybody likes it. In fact, 10 years ago, I would have vomited at the prospect of a 10-2 Ohio State team that lost at home to an 8-5 Michigan team getting to play for the national title. But as I’ve said many times, the four-team format grew stale. It excluded large swaths of the country every year and, once the other bowls became marginalized, made for an unsatisfying postseason with only three meaningful games.
While the first year of the expanded CFP was marred by a flawed seeding format, the new-and-improved 2025 version was pretty darn entertaining, Oregon-JMU and Ole Miss-Tulane notwithstanding. We got a month of meaningful football, several compelling storylines (Indiana, Miami, Ole Miss without Lane Kiffin) and a couple of classic games (Miami-Ole Miss and Indiana-Miami).
And at least this time, the best team all season won the whole thing.
Miami was the last team in the field after two ACC losses but still made a run to the title game. (Alex Slitz / Getty Images)
Who do you see as a true sleeper this upcoming year? It seems like Cal operates out of any kind of national spotlight, but it has arguably the most talented QB in the nation in freshman standout Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, and it has significantly upgraded its skill positions in the portal. — Michael R.
Cal definitely qualifies as a sleeper, though perhaps it shouldn’t after signing the nation’s No. 15 portal class, as ranked by our Sam Khan Jr. While the Bears are losing 1,000-yard receiver Jacob De Jesus, they beat out Notre Dame for Rutgers standout Ian Strong. And then on top of that, Cal got 1,000-yard MAC receiver Chase Hendricks from Ohio and one of the top tight ends in the portal, New Mexico’s Dorian Thomas.
GM Ron Rivera is going all in on the passing game, and understandably so. It was a big deal that Cal was able to even retain JKS after he blew up right from his first start as a freshman. The ball just flies out of his hand. While he had an up-and-down 2025 season, as is usually the case with a true freshman starter, he ended the regular season by shredding SMU (31 of 40, 330 yards, four TDs, no interceptions). He has a chance to be special.
What Rivera was able to do with the roster, even amid a coaching change, shows the impact of revenue-sharing. Because I assure you, Cal is not swimming in NIL donor money. You saw that last offseason when a bunch of its key guys — like, you know, the Heisman winner — left for bigger paydays. But now even a program with a long history of financial dysfunction has a nice big pot to play with.
But everything in Berkeley right now is riding on whether Tosh Lupoi is ready to be a P4 head coach. The 44-year-old former Cal linebacker got no shortage of training working under Jeff Tedford, Steve Sarkisian, Nick Saban and Dan Lanning. Perhaps he’s poised to become the next Lanning or Marcus Freeman.
But you truly never know with first-time head coaches. For every Lanning or Freeman, there’s also a DeShaun Foster or Brent Pry.
Which weekend next year do I NOT want to be at a destination wedding and unable to watch college football? — Dan B.
If someone tries to get you to leave your house the weekend of Nov. 7, definitely fake a fatal illness.
Networks and times won’t be announced for months, but we can probably guess a few.
Oregon at Ohio State (Noon, FOX)
Penn State at Washington (3:30, CBS)
Miami at Notre Dame (7:30, NBC)
Alabama at LSU (7:30, ABC)
Also:
BYU at Utah
Texas at Missouri
Oklahoma at Florida
Michigan State at Michigan
If anyone you know schedules a wedding on this day, please report them to the authorities.
