I have Oregon at No. 1, Ohio State No. 2 in my early Top 25<\/a>, so either of them imploding seems unlikely as of this moment. Moreover, the Buckeyes became the sport\u2019s safest annual bet for title contention once Nick Saban retired at Alabama.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ll fare with a remade staff (John David Baker replaces Charlie Weis Jr. as offensive coordinator) and possibly no Trinidad Chambliss.<\/p>\n Close runner-up on this one: Alabama.<\/p>\n As for the entirely new 12, this is going to be an almost complete crapshoot, but here goes (in alphabetical order):<\/p>\n \u2022 Boise State Tennessee QB Joey Aguilar just applied for what appears to be his eighth year of football<\/a>. 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? \u2014 Lukas F.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 2019: Enrolled at a junior college, redshirted<\/p>\n 2020: No season due to COVID<\/p>\n 2021: Enrolls at a second juco, plays 10 games (redshirt freshman season)<\/p>\n 2022: Same juco, plays six games (sophomore season)<\/p>\n 2023: Appalachian State, plays 14 games (junior season)<\/p>\n 2024: Appalachian State, plays 11 games (senior season)<\/p>\n At this point, he would have been out of eligibility, but thanks to the NCAA\u2019s blanket waiver following Diego Pavia\u2019s injunction, he gets back one of the juco seasons.<\/p>\n 2025: Tennessee, plays 13 games (second senior season)<\/p>\n 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\u2019s not coming back.)<\/p>\n And here\u2019s guessing the \u2026 Chancery Court of Knox County, Tennessee, will agree with him.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, there would definitely be ramifications. If I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n Truly, no one wants this.<\/p>\n The NCAA and P4 desperately need the antitrust exemption they\u2019ve been seeking from Congress so they can set and enforce their own rules<\/a>. 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<\/a>, which will never gain bipartisan support. People behind the scenes realize this but don\u2019t yet want to accept it.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Or, you know, continue on the current path where a 35-year-old Joey Aguilar is starting for his 10th school.<\/p>\n What does Michigan look like now that the portal season is mostly over? Or is Michigan one of those \u201cWho knows, until we see what Kyle Whittingham can do with those teams\u201d that could be anywhere between Playoff team and an afterthought? \u2014 Frederick C.<\/p>\n Whittingham was not handed an empty cupboard by any means, and he\u2019s only upgraded the roster since he got there. Obviously, we\u2019re 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\u2019s coaching situation was at the time. Whittingham\/Beck should mark a considerable upgrade from Sherrone Moore\/Chip Lindsey.<\/p>\n Also, Underwood\u2019s supporting cast should be stronger<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It feels like Michigan finally has some adults in the room running the program. But, of course, that doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \n Kyle Whittingham should put Michigan in a position to make the Playoff. (Chris Gardner\/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n Bob Chesney is at UCLA games making predictions like, \u201cWe\u2019re about to win a Big Ten championship!\u201d On a scale of 0 -10, where zero is never and 10 is \u201cgoing to happen next season,\u201d what do you think the chances are that his prediction comes true? \u2014 John H.<\/p>\n We live in a post-Curt Cignetti world now, where the baseline answer to a question like this one will never again be \u201c0.\u201d Heck, I\u2019d probably set the baseline at 4 and go from there. Maybe a 6?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 48 and already has 16 years of head-coaching experience. He won in Division III (at Salve Regina, which I\u2019ve only heard of from Chesney\u2019s Wikipedia page), Division II (Assumption College), FCS (Holy Cross) and G5 (JMU). There\u2019s no reason to think that won\u2019t continue now that he\u2019s ascended to the P4.<\/p>\n But Chesney could be the greatest football coach in the history of the world and he\u2019d still have a ceiling if UCLA, as an institution, continues to operate as it has over the past 10-20 years.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s breakthrough.<\/p>\n UCLA\u2019s 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\u2019t helped. After Chip Kelly left in early 2024, AD Martin Jarmond promoted DeShaun Foster mostly to save money. That blew up spectacularly<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t expect it to happen in two years.<\/p>\n 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\u2019m 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? \u2014 Christian F.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s no way to be certain the committee didn\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n Now that we\u2019re 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\u2019t need one.<\/p>\n This, of course, is the case with almost every other major sport that has a single-elimination postseason tournament. We\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n And at least this time, the best team all season won the whole thing.<\/p>\n \n 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)<\/p>\n 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. \u2014 Michael R.<\/p>\n Cal definitely qualifies as a sleeper, though perhaps it shouldn\u2019t after signing the nation\u2019s No. 15 portal class, as ranked by our Sam Khan Jr.<\/a> 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\u2019s Dorian Thomas.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n
\u2022 BYU
\u2022 Florida
\u2022 Louisville
\u2022 LSU
\u2022 Michigan
\u2022 Minnesota (Bruce talked me into this one)
\u2022 Notre Dame
\u2022 Oklahoma State (this year\u2019s 2024 Indiana!)
\u2022 Texas
\u2022 USC<\/a>
\u2022 Washington<\/p>\n![\"Kyle](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/GettyImages-2235965079-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Miami's](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/GettyImages-2257151181-scaled.jpg\")
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