For as long as I can remember, I’ve always enjoyed purchasing preseason magazines in an effort to glean as much information as I can about any given college football team in any given season.
Of course, no publication ever predicted an exact order of finish, but they could, at least, provide a multitude of information that could go a long way in providing the reader with some semblance of a team’s personnel, their schedule, returning starters, etcetera.
Nowadays, unless you just want to purchase one of the multitude of preseason publications that are available, their predictions are going to be even more speculative than ever thanks in large part to NIL.
Players these days (and you really can’t blame them), knowing that their chances of playing in the NFL are as farfetched as they ever were, including the pre NIL era, are going to be like everybody else in the national workforce, they’re simply going to play for whichever team that offers them the most money.
For that reason, no one ever knows from one season to the next how any given season is going to play out. Every single season, coaching staffs have to scramble to assemble their rosters. They have to wait and see which of the players who played for them the year before will no longer be around the next season and then go out and bring in players from the same portal they lost them to.
It’s maddening. It’s depressing. It’s every negative adjective that can be used to describe the current state of what used to be known as college football. Let’s face it. College football is a “used to be” thing, and when universities try to end it with legalization, it isn’t going to work.
Since the universities are paying players anyway, there will be no legal way to block players, even if they have played in an NFL regular season game, from returning to college to play if they still had eligibility left.
The NCAA member institutions will try, and they already have, but it won’t stand up in the court of law. LSU is about to sign two players who were waived by NFL teams and the bitching and moaning among NCAA figureheads will add up to nothing. Zilch.
I used to enjoy predicting the final top 25. Sometimes I would come relatively close and there were also times when I hoped people wouldn’t look back to see how far off I was at the end of the season.
There are certain teams, perhaps as many as half, that are being touted as shoo-ins to make the twelve team field again the season. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if teams like Ohio State, Georgia, Texas, or even defending national champion Indiana won’t even qualify for the playoffs this season. And it’ll be that way every season going forward because no team, from one season to the next, will be able to forecast whether or not the players they bring in via the portal will mesh into a cohesive, winning unit.
In this era, a team could finish 2-10 one season and 10-2 the next, get hot, qualify for the CFB playoff, and win it all. Who knows, maybe a team from Hattiesburg, Mississippi could wind up as national champion in 2026? I, for one, wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.
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