Preseason 2026 college football hot takes are supposed to play it safe, pick the 4 teams everybody already has in their top 5, name a Heisman favorite the whole country already knows, call it a day and move on, and I’m not doing any of that. Here are 5 things I actually believe are going to happen this season, receipts included, and I’ll take the heat when a couple of these go sideways in November because that’s the deal you make when you say something out loud instead of hedging it, so screenshot this one now and come back and check in December.
The Boldest of My 2026 College Football Hot Takes Is North Dakota State Winning the Mountain West
North Dakota State is walking into the Mountain West this fall and winning the whole thing, and the funniest part of this take is how close it almost wasn’t even legal.
This is a program that’s won 10 FCS national championships since 2011, under 4 different coaches, which means it’s not one genius running the show, it’s a machine that keeps cranking out title teams no matter who’s holding the clipboard. That’s the roster walking into a conference that just watched Boise State, Fresno State, San Diego State, Colorado State and Utah State all bail for the new Pac-12 in the same offseason. The Mountain West didn’t get slightly weaker and then add NDSU as a nice consolation prize. It got GUTTED and then handed the keys to a dynasty.
Here’s the part that should actually make people mad if they think about it too long. Up until June 24 of this year, none of that mattered, because the NCAA had a rule forcing any team jumping from FCS to FBS to sit out the postseason for 2 full years. How do you write a rule specifically built to stop exactly this, and then repeal it weeks before exactly this happens anyway? NDSU could have gone unbeaten in the Mountain West and still watched the conference championship game from a suite with a soda, and if that’s not the most backwards rule in the sport, I don’t even… Then, weeks before the season, the NCAA Division I Cabinet quietly voted the whole thing away. NDSU is now fully eligible, conference title, bowl game, even the College Football Playoff, provided they finish 6-6 or better, which is not exactly a stretch for a program that’s been playing meaningful November football basically every year for the last decade and a half.
New Mexico and UNLV tied for first in the old Mountain West at 6-2 last year, and that’s the actual ceiling NDSU is walking into. The Bison do have to travel to both of them, UNLV on Oct. 10 and New Mexico on Oct. 24, so at least the schedule makers gave the league a puncher’s chance, but I don’t think it matters, actually, no, I know it doesn’t matter, a program that’s won a national title more years than not since 2011 isn’t losing twice to a league that just shipped out its 5 best teams the same summer it repealed the exact rule that was supposed to keep the new kid in check.
Virginia Tech Finishes Ranked Higher Than the Program That Fired Its Coach
James Franklin gets the last laugh this year, and Penn State basically handed him the ammunition to make it happen.
Go back to last October, when Penn State was 2 weeks removed from a home loss to Oregon and a road humiliation at UCLA, a team that hadn’t led a single game all season before it led that one. Then Northwestern beat them at home, 22-21, and by Sunday Franklin was fired after 12 seasons and 104 wins, a guy who’d taken the program to a playoff semifinal the year before, done in because 3 losses in a row was somehow enough to end it. How do you fire a guy with that resume over a 3 game skid and not even have the next guy lined up?
What happened next is the part that should embarrass the administration more than the record did. Penn State spent 58 days searching for a replacement while Franklin had already landed the Virginia Tech job and was quietly working the phones on Penn State’s own incoming recruiting class. By the time Matt Campbell got introduced in State College, Franklin had been the head coach at Virginia Tech for 3 full weeks and had already pulled 24 of Penn State’s own commits away with him, spread across 11 different schools. The program that fired him COULDN’T even keep its own recruiting class in the building long enough to hire the guy replacing him.
Franklin’s saying publicly he’s got a chip on his shoulder now, and I believe him, no, I believe every word of it. You don’t get shown the door after over a decade without wanting somebody to feel it, and in this case the somebody is still figuring out who its own head coach even is 3 months after he’d already started rebuilding a roster 2 states away, which is exactly the kind of thing that sticks with a guy.
Here’s the schedule gap that seals it for me. Penn State still has to see Ohio State and Michigan every single year, the exact 2 teams Franklin went 4-16 against, which is a massive reason he’s gone in the first place, while Virginia Tech gets Clemson and Miami in the ACC, good programs, not annual buzzsaws. Give Franklin 1 clean offseason to get his own guys into that building, and I think the Hokies finish this season ranked ahead of the program that just spent 2 months figuring out who should replace him.
Texas Runs the Table in the Regular Season and Still Gets Bounced in Round One
Texas goes 12-0 this year and then loses in the very first round of the playoff, and I think both halves of that take come from the exact same cause.
Start with why the 12-0 part is real. Arch Manning finished last season on an actual tear, 11 touchdowns against 1 interception over his final 5 games, and Sarkisian didn’t sit on his hands this offseason to celebrate it. He went out and got Manning a real number one target in Cam Coleman, added transfer running backs Raleek Brown and Hollywood Smothers, rebuilt the offensive line, and brought in Will Muschamp to fix a defense that finished 43rd nationally in defensive success rate a year ago. This is the most talented roster Sarkisian has ever had in Austin, full stop.
Look at what they actually have to survive to get there, Ohio State in week 2, Tennessee on the road, Oklahoma in the Red River game, Ole Miss at home, a trip to LSU to face Lane Kiffin in front of a Death Valley crowd looking to make a statement in his first year, and a trip to Texas A&M to close the whole thing out. What actually beats a team this loaded? I think Texas wins every single one of those games, I really do, and that’s exactly the problem.
Winning a schedule that hard takes something out of a team that a normal 12-0 season never has to pay. Every one of those games is a real fight, because Texas is the best team on all 6 of those opponents’ schedules too, and everybody’s bringing their best shot. Survive 6 months of that gauntlet and the first round of the playoff hands you a team that’s been coasting through a soft conference all year, fresh, angry, with nothing left to lose, and Texas is walking in having taken a real hit EVERY single Saturday since Labor Day, and that kind of thing catches up with a team more often than the rankings want to admit, it just does, it always…
I’m not saying Texas isn’t the best team in the country this year, I think they probably are, but I’m saying the most talented team and the team that actually wins it all aren’t always the same team, and this Texas roster is about to find that out the hard way, in front of a home crowd that spent all fall being told they were watching a coronation.
LSU Misses the Playoff and the Kiffin-to-Alabama Rumors Get Loud Again
LSU doesn’t make the playoff in year 1 under Lane Kiffin, and by the time Thanksgiving rolls around everybody’s asking about Alabama again.
This hire was strange from the jump. Kiffin left an Ole Miss team that was 10-1 and sitting inside the actual playoff picture to go coach LSU in the middle of the season, an announcement that dropped the day after Alabama needed a late touchdown just to survive Auburn, and that timing wasn’t an accident, not with reports out of that stretch, Paul Finebaum among them, saying Kiffin had been working the phones trying to get the Alabama job when Nick Saban first retired, and real belief inside the sport that if Bama had moved on from Kalen DeBoer after that Iron Bowl, Kiffin would have been on the next flight to Tuscaloosa instead of Baton Rouge.
He never got that chance, DeBoer kept his job, Kiffin took the LSU money instead, reportedly north of $90 million over 7 years, and that should have been the end of the story right there.
Except in April, Kiffin posted this out of nowhere about how most people who say they want change don’t really mean it, how they want the feeling of changing without paying what it actually costs. Signed off with be just different, LSU football. Why is a guy who just signed a $90 million deal still posting like a man halfway out the door? The internet connected it to Alabama within the hour, because everybody already knows why at this point, they just do…
Strip away all the noise and here’s what I actually think happens on the field. LSU is walking a brand new coach and staff into a loaded SEC with zero chemistry built up over a full offseason, and that’s a real disadvantage no matter how much money got spent on the roster. I think they’re good, I think they’re a 9 or 10 win team, and I think that’s not enough this year in a conference with this much depth at the top. The second LSU has any kind of stumble, the Alabama rumors come roaring back, because they NEVER actually went away in the first place.
4 Head Coaches Get Fired Before This Season Ends, and Dabo Swinney Is One of Them
4 different Power Four programs fire their head coach before this regular season is over, and I think Dabo Swinney is one of them.
I want to say that up front because I know exactly how it sounds. Swinney is the winningest coach in Clemson history and in ACC history, 2 national championships, 9 ACC titles, 8 of them inside an 11-year stretch where Clemson was legitimately one of the 2 or 3 best programs in the country, and none of that gets erased by what I’m about to say.
Clemson went 7-6 last year, their worst season since 2013, and lost to a Penn State team whose own head coach had already been fired by the time the 2 programs played each other in the bowl game. Sit with that for a second. How does a program produce more NFL draft picks than actual wins in the same season? The Tigers had 9 players drafted into the NFL last season and won 7 games with that exact roster. That gap doesn’t happen because the talent walked out the door, it happens because something at the top STOPPED working.
Swinney’s buyout sits at $60 million this year, dropping to $57 million next year, with no NFL offset clause anywhere in the deal, which is exactly the kind of number that makes an administration talk itself into 1 more season instead of pulling the trigger early. Clemson opens this year on the road at LSU in week 1, against Lane Kiffin, in front of a crowd that’s about to find out fast whether their brand new coach can win a big one right away, and a bad loss there doesn’t just start the season 0-1, it starts the hot seat conversation in September instead of waiting for November.
Swinney’s not the only one walking into this either, because Mike Norvell is sitting on a Florida State job that multiple outlets already call the hottest seat in the sport, somewhere around $58 million still owed to him if it ends. Dave Aranda’s defense at Baylor ranked 105th in the country in points allowed last year, which is not a typo. Deion Sanders watched Colorado get outscored 200 to 77 across their final 5 games of 2025, and reputations built on hype don’t survive a stretch like that twice.
I’m not saying any of these 4 guys are bad coaches, I’m saying the money in this sport moves faster than loyalty does now, administrations pull triggers in October that they used to wait until December for, and by the time we’re all back here next year, I think Dabo Swinney’s name is on the list of guys who used to have this job, and if I’m wrong about this one, I’ll…
