16 Things We Know for Sure About the 2025 College Football Season

It has been a long slog of an offseason filled with numerous off-the-field storylines, but college football has officially returned just as the temperatures outside have started to cool down. We received only a small sampler during Week Zero action, but it won’t be long before the main course gets served in the run up to Labor Day and we can finally say college football is fully back.

Sports Illustrated has spent much of the past few months talking with coaches, players, athletic directors, commissioners, agents, general managers and more as part of our comprehensive 2025 preview of the sport, and the one thing that is striking is how little they all know about their teams. That wasn’t the case 20, 10 or even five years ago—everybody at least had an inkling.

What do we, really and truly, know about the coming 2025 campaign in college football? Here are 16 truths about the sport as we hit Week 1.

Ohio State has the best offensive and defensive player in the country

There are a surprising number of question marks and unknowns about the reigning national champions coming into this season, but the good news for Ryan Day is he has Jeremiah Smith and Caleb Downs to lead the charge at a title defense. The former looks like a future Hall of Famer after just one year at this level, and the latter is one of the rare players who will be worth a top 10 pick at his position based on his incredible instincts and intelligence.

There’s no way Arch Manning lives up to the hype—and that’s O.K.

If you looked at metrics for just about any social media post or story the last two years about Arch Manning, it significantly outperformed anything else that day. There’s just that kind of interest in the Texas quarterback, which surpassed the level surrounding Tim Tebow, before the redshirt sophomore’s first full season under center even kicks off. There’s no chance he can live up to that kind of hype even if he throws for 3,500 yards and scores 40-plus touchdowns while leading the Longhorns to the title game. And that’s going to be just fine in the grand scheme of things and far from an indictment on his ability to play the position.

Michigan’s offense can only improve from last season

It was a minor miracle the Wolverines won eight games in 2024 given they scored just 22 points per game (113th in the country) and only averaged more yards per play than Northwestern and Florida State among Power 4 teams (not the company you wanted to keep). The track record with true freshmen quarterbacks isn’t always great, but in five-star Bryce Underwood or veteran transfers Mikey Keene and Jake Garcia, there should be some massive gains from a team that struggled to throw a forward pass the year after winning the national title.

Boise State may lose more games but will still be the best Group of 5 team

Ashton Jeanty is off to the NFL, but the Broncos should still be viewed as the Group of 5 bid favorite for the CFP given what returns and how far ahead of everybody else in the Mountain West they are. QB Maddux Madsen will keep proving folks wrong, there are more than a dozen starters back and Sire Gaines is next in line in the backfield. The schedule is probably more difficult than last season (trips to USF, Air Force and Notre Dame in particular) but this is the best the G5 has to offer even if they aren’t ranked as highly or don’t win as much as they did last season.

Tulane is the only Group of 5 team in the country with quarterback depth

You either have a starting quarterback or an incoming transfer at the position and then a lot of inexperience behind them. That might not be the case at Tulane, which is a contender for that Group of 5 bid under Jon Sumrall. The Green Wave notably landed BYU transfer Jake Retzlaff before the season started and he’s got lots of familiarity with the staff as they were the first to offer him in high school when most of them were at Troy a few years ago. On top of that, former Northwestern/Iowa starter Brendan Sullivan is around and Kadin Semonza also has experience as Ball State’s starter. Few, if any, teams can count on having any sort of quarterback depth that could survive an injury or two, but Tulane is in a rare place of luxury despite losing Darian Mensah to Duke.

USC is going to have a stud receiver

The Trojans’ passing game has trailed off since Caleb Williams’s first season in Los Angeles, but it’s safe to say the team will still have a go-to receiver that opponents will still have to game plan for given the recent track record under Lincoln Riley. In 2021, that was Drake London before he became a first-rounder, in ’22 it was Jordan Addison before he did the same and in ’23 Tahj Washington topped 1,000 yards and Brenden Rice scored a dozen touchdowns. Zachariah Branch wasn’t as big of a factor as expected last season before he left for Georgia, but in Makai Lemon (14.69 yards per catch) and Ja’Kobi Lane (12 touchdowns), the team should have two stars in the making for ’25.

Auburn at Oklahoma will be a defining game for the coaching carousel

There are some very warm seats around the SEC this season, but no game means more for whether we get a super active coaching carousel than this Sept. 20 meeting in Norman, Okla. Hugh Freeze has the most manageable buyout of all those in his league and is just 11–14 overall on the Plains with the offense—his speciality—almost unwatchable at times since he took over. Brent Venables has the Sooners’ defense operating at a high level but needs to win enough to stop drawing comparisons to John Blake. This feels like a loser leaves town scenario even if the trigger isn’t pulled until closer to December in either place.

Clemson Tigers head coach Dabo Swinney with quarterback Cade Klubnik — Dabo Swinney (left) and quarterback Cade Klubnik are expected to have Clemson back in the national title picture. | Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

Clemson is the safest pick to make the College Football Playoff

It feels like there’s a deep group of CFP contenders in 2025 of about seven or eight teams, but the safest to actually reach the postseason tournament is Clemson. The Tigers have the greatest disparity between what they’re capable of and the rest of their league, plus they benefit from a schedule that is quite favorable no matter what happens in the opener against LSU. They were more lucky than good last season, but this program looks like it’s back to how it was when it was winning national titles under Dabo Swinney a few years ago.

Utah will get significantly better quarterback play

Cursed is a good way to describe the quarterback position in Salt Lake City. The Utes went through a few years of will he/won’t he play with Cam Rising and then the bottom completely fell out in 2024 under center. That changes in ’25 as it’s hard to have worse injury luck than they have. Devon Dampier and a new offensive coordinator figure to significantly raise both the floor and ceiling of the attack.

Playoff format will dominate the CFP discussion more than the teams will this season

Despite the national championship race seeming as wide open as it has been in ages, the discourse when it comes to the College Football Playoff will sadly focus more on the future format of the event and the drama surrounding it than it does the action on the field prior to Selection Sunday. Blame the commissioners for digging their heels in and leaving this until the fall instead of settling things over the summer about 2026 and beyond.

Kalen DeBoer will look much more comfortable in the SEC, and that will rub off on the Tide

DeBoer looked exasperated at times on the sidelines as Alabama faltered on the road in the league, but he’ll have a much better grip on both the SEC and his team this season. This isn’t the case of a head coach taking over for Nick Saban and trying to shoehorn his ideas onto players who might not be brought in anymore, but will instead be one of the most talented rosters in the country playing like they’re capable of each week in league play.

The Big 12 will be the most fun league to watch every weekend

You can make a case for every single team in the Big 12 to win the conference. Not only did that pretty much play out last season, but it should be the case once again given how much returns in terms of production and starts. Nobody had more games come down to the fourth quarter than the Big 12 in 2024 and with the amount of coin-flip matchups in store on the schedule, every single weekend will be must-see from noon until deep into Saturday night.

Nebraska will end the year ranked for the first time since 2013

Year 3 is when Matt Rhule’s teams typically make a big jump and the Cornhuskers are primed to do just that. They’ve got a full offseason under new OC Dana Holgorsen, a returning quarterback and should be much better on special teams to help turn some of those one-score games in their favor. The schedule looks very manageable and it wouldn’t be shocking to see them as a fringe CFP team going into late November.

A quarterback will win the Heisman Trophy, but the race is as wide open as ever

Voters are far more apt to consider non-traditional candidates than they ever have been and Travis Hunter’s Heisman win cemented that last December. Despite a number of candidates who fit that similar mold though, a quarterback will flash the stiff-arm for the eighth time in the past decade. There are just too many big names to feel otherwise, from Manning to Drew Allar to Cade Klubnik to Garrett Nussmeier to LaNorris Sellers and beyond, the list is deep and they’ll have plenty of opportunities to solidify one of the group as the most outstanding player of 2025.

The number of coaches fired midseason will tick up from 2024

Every SEC coach returned last season and only six Power 4 jobs came open last cycle. It will be much more active this time around and we will almost assuredly see an uptick in mid-year firings after that wasn’t much of a thing last season. Part of this is that for all the worrying over keeping rosters around. The arrival of revenue sharing and contracts will slow some of the player movement down and put even more pressure on coaches to win immediately if they’re on the hot seat.

There are more national title contenders than ever and it will lead to the most fun season in ages

You could really make a good case that anybody from No. 1 Texas down to No. 9 LSU in the AP Top 25 preseason poll could really win it all this season. That doesn’t mean we’re in store for some sort of 2007-like turnover at the top of the polls, but there is a really deep group of contenders which will make the 2025 campaign one of the most fun yet from the start all the way to the finish in Miami this January.