Until Saturday Newsletter 🏈 | This is The Athletic’s college football newsletter. Sign up here to receive Until Saturday directly in your inbox.
Today in college football news, “Expedition 33” is my favorite “Final Fantasy” game ever. To be clear, it is not a “Final Fantasy” game.
2025 Countdown: The purple port in the storm
If you polled 100 college football fans on which FBS teams are expected to win each conference this year, I’m sure most could name the betting favorites in the ACC (Clemson), Big Ten (Ohio State), Mountain West (Boise State) and SEC (Texas), plus probably CUSA (Liberty) and the Sun Belt (JMU). Maybe the MAC too, where I assume Toledo will again be the favorite in 2099.
But what about the Big 12? After Arizona State’s playoff run, arguably Iowa State’s best season ever and a half-year of Texas Tech transfer talk? Plus the usual Colorado rubbernecking? And maybe some assumptions that Oklahoma State or Utah will bounce back, just like TCU did last year?
The Big 12’s favorite — according to BetMGM, FPI, SP+ and whatever else — is Kansas State, followed by a giant bottleneck. Oh right, Kansas State! Wait, the team that went 5-4 in conference last year, finishing eighth in a 16-team league?
At first glance, picking K-State kinda feels like a shrug. (A shrug by the computers? Yes, computers can decline to answer. Haven’t you seen “2001”?) But for more, I asked Kellis Robinett, beat writer for the Wichita Eagle/Kansas City Star: Why do you think this under-the-radar team is so widely favored?
“Kansas State is always a safe bet in the Big 12, because the Wildcats have such a high floor. Chris Klieman has averaged nine wins over the past four seasons, and he won a conference title in 2022. Even though K-State lost some high-end talent during the offseason, it brings back big stars at quarterback (Avery Johnson), running back (Dylan Edwards), and wide receiver (Jayce Brown). Austin Romaine also seems poised for a breakout season on defense. Arizona State is the defending champ, and Texas Tech is the biggest spender in the league, but K-State has proven to be consistently better than both.”
Honestly, I’m nearly sold on K-State just by Klieman’s consistency. Why not pick the team that has been most immune to the Big 12’s feared Random Results Generator? (On top of that, picking a team that just finished in the middle is probably a safe bet. As has been frequently noted, last year’s Big 12 preseason picks were nearly the opposite of the final standings. Avoid the bookends.)
Before we leave the Big 12, yes, I asked David Ubben the obligatory Colorado question (more on Deion Sanders in a sec): Wtf will this team be now that Heisman winner Travis Hunter and school-record-smashing QB Shedeur Sanders are gone?
“The short version is: better than people who aren’t paying attention think. Colorado had two of the five most famous players in the country last year, who were also stellar talents. This year, they start with little to no star power, but Sanders and his staff have quietly improved the roster on both sides of the ball, which raises the floor for this team quite a bit. They won’t be as explosive in the passing game without Sanders, Hunter and Jimmy Horn Jr., but they’ll be good enough, and the running game should improve. I’m not sure I see a contender for the Big 12 title in this roster, but I do see a bowl team.”
More Big 12:
Quick Snaps
🙏 “Deion Sanders had his bladder removed in May after doctors discovered an aggressive cancerous tumor, the Colorado football coach announced at a Monday news conference.” He’s back at work now. Many more details here.
Sanders: “The initial thing you do is what we all do, we google it. That’s the wrong thing to do because they tell you, ‘You gonna die, dog.’ Whoever’s doing Google, you need to change it up.”
🏈 Stewart Mandel on the Week 1 games that will actually impact the CFP. (As in, Texas-Ohio State might not end up meaning much if they both make it anyway.)
👀 That 15-year storyline about the Big Ten and SEC potentially dueling over North Carolina in realignment? Heating back up.
📰 News:
Ralph Russo explains what to actually know about Donald Trump’s college sports executive order. (Meanwhile, Congress might finally be making some progress on a regulation bill of its own.)
“Pat McAfee apologized to Ole Miss student Mary Kate Cornett on ‘The Pat McAfee Show’ Wednesday, months after amplifying an unsubstantiated rumor.” He also said he apologized in person.
“USC coach Lincoln Riley wants to preserve the Trojans’ historic rivalry against Notre Dame. But he said he won’t work to do it at the expense of damaging a USC bid to qualify for the College Football Playoff.” Man, there is no playoff that would be worth getting rid of a bunch of ancient rivalries.
“UTSA coach Jeff Traylor said his quarterback receiving leaked playbook information from a former Memphis player ‘had no bearing whatsoever’ on the outcome of the teams’ game last year.” Intrigue.
🌀 A tale of two QBs:
📺 Media days, where the big leagues wrapped up last week:
At the Big Ten‘s event, they did talk about things besides the SEC’s schedule and the next CFP format. No, really! Here’s proof.
Among the ACC takeaways: Bill Belichick can actually speak like a human, ICYMI.
🎤 Take The Athletic’s survey on everything you love and hate about CFB right now. (Like me, you should vote to replace the entire CFP with the one true format: a plus-one title game at the Rose Bowl, with its participants to be selected after bowl season.)
Study Abroad: College football returning to Germany?
International college football has been a thing since almost literally the very beginning. (For one thing, the sport was so directly modeled on a version of English rugby, it’s actually kinda hard to pinpoint when it actually became American football. For another, Montreal’s McGill University was among the Canadian pioneers of the sport in the 1870s.)
Since then, American colleges have sent football teams to bowls in the Bahamas, Canada, Cuba and Japan; FBS neutral-siters in Australia and Ireland; and lower-level games in Bermuda, China, Italy, Mexico, Tanzania and the UK, plus (per NCAA records) collegiate-adjacent games among American military installations in Algeria, Iran, New Guinea, the Philippines, Suriname and some Pacific islands.
That list also includes a five-game tour of Europe in 1976, when the NAIA’s Texas A&M-Kingsville and Henderson State (Ark.) barnstormed across Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Mannheim and Nuremberg. Texas’ Javelinas swept all five.
Also, American service members once staged a three-game CFB-ish series throughout Germany in December 1946 (playing in events like the “Augsburg Rose Bowl” and “Nuremberg Sugar Bowl”).
And Ohio’s most German-sounding Division III universities (Heidelberg and Otterbein) once fired up their ongoing rivalry with a 1992 tie in Frankfurt.
So when you hear Michigan and Western Michigan are planning to open 2026 in Frankfurt as the first FBS teams to play in Germany, know it’s not just Modern College Football Chasing Trends And Trying To Be The NFL. It’s also College Football Just Being Itself.
(Top photo: Stacy Revere/Getty Images)
