I appreciate you guys keeping the questions coming even after the games have ended. I promise to keep the answers flowing all offseason.
Yes, the Big Ten has claimed the last two national titles. Yes, an SEC team didn’t make it to the final game either of those years. But given that the SEC won four titles in a row prior to that — and that the Big Ten only made one championship game appearance between 2015 and 2022 — is it possible that all these “the SEC’s dominance is dead” judgments I’ve been reading on this site are just a wee bit hysterical? — Doug G., Macon, Ga.
Let Big Ten fans have their moment. They had to listen to SEC fans crow about theirs for 17 years.
But it’s inevitable the SEC will rise back up … perhaps as soon as next season.
The SEC is still the part of the country with the most talent. The portal has helped neutralize that advantage to some extent, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone. And just like Ohio State donors were spurred to action by Michigan’s success, SEC folks are not standing by idly. They’re mobilizing as we speak. Georgia and Alabama in particular got caught sleeping in the NIL landscape in part because there wasn’t that same urgency. There is now.
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And it also helps that the SEC has more programs capable of winning a national title. It’s a big reason why it was able to dominate as long as it did. Alabama won the most by far, but Tennessee (1998), LSU (2003, 2007 and 2019), Florida (2006, 2008), Auburn (2010) and Georgia (2021 and ’22) have all won national championships in the BCS and College Football Playoff eras. The SEC also added Oklahoma (2000) and Texas (2005). The Big Ten has thus far had two, Ohio State (2002, 2014, 2024) and Michigan (2023), plus USC (2003 and ‘04) after it joined the conference.
It’s interesting the Big Ten’s repeat occurred just as the “Power 2” label became a thing. Two years ago, I would have said yes, it’s a Power 2 in terms of revenue, but on the field it’s more like the Power 1. Not anymore.
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Why did Jim Knowles make a lateral move? How does this impact your opinion of Penn State in 2025? — Bill S.
Head coaches’ career moves usually have pretty obvious motives, but you never really know what drives assistants’ decisions. Knowles, who left his job as Ohio State’s defensive coordinator for the same role Penn State, was also connected to Oklahoma’s search. He seemed to be looking elsewhere even before the national championship game.
And of course, money matters. Penn State threw a lot of it at him — $3.1 million a year, blowing away the sport’s previous known high of $2.5 million, set by former LSU DC Dave Aranda and current LSU DC Blake Baker.
I already had the Nittany Lions No. 1 in my early Top 25, and this move reaffirmed my decision. Penn State is clearly going all in for 2025, much the way Michigan did in 2023 and Ohio State in 2024. In fact, James Franklin’s big splash with Knowles calls to mind Day’s landing Chip Kelly as his offensive coordinator last year. Ohio State was paying Knowles $2.2 million and Kelly $2 million last season, the highest combo in the country. Now Penn State will be spending nearly $5 million between Knowles and OC Andy Kotelnicki ($1.7 million, per the Centre Daily Times.)
In my Dec. 18 Mailbag, I said we might be seeing the beginnings of a coach-salary plateau. I hereby rescind that answer.
With LSU signing such a strong transfer class, expectations will be high in Baton Rouge. Would another four-loss season force athletic director Scott Woodward to admit that the Brian Kelly experiment has failed? How do LSU’s chances of making the Playoff stack up compared to their conference peers? — Andrew G., Houston
I feel confident saying Kelly won’t have a job in 2026 if he loses four games in 2025. Winning eight or nine games every year is far below LSU’s standard. Kelly got a free pass last season because expectations were modest to begin with after losing Jayden Daniels. There will be no excuses next season, with QB Garrett Nussmeier and most of the offense returning and a No. 1-rated portal class arriving. I had the Tigers No. 4 in my early rankings, and I could have justified ranking them higher.
It also helps Kelly’s cause that both Alabama and Georgia (less so) are at their most vulnerable states since he came to LSU. When he arrived in 2022, Georgia was coming off of the first of back-to-back national titles and Nick Saban was still rolling in Tuscaloosa. Catching up to either or both programs felt less attainable then. Texas has obviously presented a new obstacle, but LSU doesn’t play the Longhorns next season.
Kelly will be reasonably expected to reach the Playoff next season. That will require being one of the top three or four teams in the conference. It won’t be easy, as a bunch of other programs (Florida, South Carolina, Texas A&M) are also well-positioned to take a jump in 2025, but LSU is at no disadvantage relative to any of them.
Before this season, the one-year “rent a quarterback” model did not lead to a national championship. Now that Will Howard helped Ohio State do just that, how will this result impact recruiting high school quarterbacks? — Karl T., Minneapolis
Not only that, he faced another one-year guy, Notre Dame’s Riley Leonard, in the championship game. It’s reached the point where it feels surprising when a team doesn’t have a transfer quarterback.
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But you’ve still got to recruit high-school guys because the portal is such a crapshoot. Coaches can spend two years evaluating and pursuing the guys they most believe in coming out of high school. In the portal, you might have two days. And it’s the most important position on the field. I can’t imagine doing all the other work to build a championship program, and then put all your eggs in a given season on whether you hit on one guy in the portal.
I would also note that next season is shaping up to be the opposite of this season. Barring a spring pickup, the top seven teams in my early Top 25 are all expected to start guys they signed out of high school: Penn State’s Drew Allar, Texas’s Arch Manning, Notre Dame’s CJ Carr or Steve Angeli, LSU’s Nussmeier, Clemson’s Cade Klubnik, Ohio State’s Julian Sayin and Georgia’s Gunner Stockton. Ditto No. 11 Florida (DJ Lagway), No. 13 Tennessee (Nico Iamaleava) and No. 14 Alabama (Ty Simpson), and it’s 10 of the top 15.
I wouldn’t read much into it, other than to say coaches will have to continue to make decisions on a year-in, year-out basis. Last year, Ryan Day looked at his quarterbacks after the bowl game and decided he needed to bring in a veteran. This year, he feels good about his guys. Though with Devin Brown (Cal) and Air Noland (South Carolina) both entering the portal, he will likely be on the market for a veteran this spring.
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It seemed this year in college football there were more issues than ever about officiating. Multiple poor judgement calls cost Georgia Tech an upset at Georgia, and obviously wrong replay booth decisions gave Miami wins against Virginia Tech and Louisville. What is you and your peers’ perspectives on the quality of officiating? — Kevin P.
I didn’t think either of those overturned calls in Miami’s favor were incorrect; it just seemed controversial because it happened in back-to-back weeks. Your broader point is valid, though.
It definitely felt like there were more mishandled calls in key moments than usual this season. The infamous delayed picked-up flag in the first Georgia-Texas game. The personal foul against South Carolina that wiped out a game-sealing pick-six. The Jeremiah Smith OPI in the first Ohio State-Oregon game. The missed targeting call late in the Texas-Arizona State CFP game. And I could list a whole bunch of other ones.
Maybe that’s just bad luck. Maybe officials’ overall batting average was the same or better than previous seasons, and it just so happened that some of the misses were particularly noticeable. But it doesn’t matter, because those big moments are the ones people remember, and it hurts the credibility of college officiating.
“This, to me, has been one of the worst years (of officiating) in my entire coaching career,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said toward the end of the regular season. “This has been one of the worst, and not just here, I’m talking about just across college football. It’s been really bad.”
As always, my biggest gripe with college officiating is the lack of transparency. Conferences rarely comment on a controversial call. To this day, we still don’t know what the heck happened in Georgia-Texas during that long delay that led to the officials wiping out a pick-six. Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark had plenty to say about the no-targeting call in the Peach Bowl, but no one involved in the decision itself said anything. It all makes me extremely jealous of the NBA’s last-two minutes report.
We’re talking about a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, where jobs and careers are constantly on the line. (Plus however many millions or billions of gambling dollars are on the line.) And this key thing that can swing the results is allowed to just take place in secrecy. It’s ridiculous.
To be fair, college officials do hundreds of hours of training, they’re constantly being evaluated and reevaluated. They’re never going to be perfect. But they should be subject to far more public accountability than they are now.
If you had to pick a Big 12 school to step forward and establish itself as a perennial CFP participant (let’s say, six in a 10-year run), which would you pick? — Jon, Dallas
On paper, it’s TCU. It’s hard to beat that program’s location, and it generally has the highest recruiting upside of those 16 schools. It finished the highest in the conference last season, albeit at No. 24. It’s also got quite a track record — four seasons with 11 or more wins since joining the Big 12 in 2012, including a national championship game appearance in 2022. It’s the only one of the 16 schools to achieve that latter feat.
The question is whether Sonny Dykes is the kind of coach that can maximize those advantages. He made a huge splash in his first season by winning 13 games and beating Michigan in a CFP semifinal, but the Horned Frogs fell to 5-7 the next season. They rebounded to 9-4 in 2024, but that team was fairly underwhelming. It beat one bowl team (Texas Tech) the entire regular season before routing 10-win Sun Belt foe Louisiana in the New Mexico Bowl.
Meanwhile, Kenny Dillingham just produced Arizona State’s best season in nearly 30 years. We’ll see if it turns into the start of a sustained run or if it’s a flash in the pan, but you figure a 34-year-old alumnus of the school could be leading that program for many years to come. But TCU has a much longer track record of success.
In general, though, it’s going to be very hard for any Big 12 school to achieve that many appearances simply because there’s so little margin for error. If Year 1 was any indication, it may be a one-bid league more often than not, which means you have to win the conference to get in. And in ASU’s case this year, that meant winning a nebulous tiebreaker over two other teams just to get into the conference title game.
The good news: Big 12 fans found out this year you can still have a fulfilling season without reaching the CFP. Iowa State beating a 10-win Miami team in the Pop-Tarts Bowl and BYU spoiling Colorado’s coronation in the Alamo Bowl felt like pretty nice prizes.
It seems to me that the only real way to have effective rules regarding NIL, the transfer portal, etc. is for there to be a collective bargaining agreement with a players union of some sort. What is the possibility of that happening? — Tim C.
Things definitely seemed to be heading in that direction over the past several years, but have recently come to a screeching halt, for political reasons.
Back in 2021, Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, issued a memo to officers stating her position that college athletes should be characterized as employees. While not binding in any way, it opened the door to petitions by several groups — most notably the Dartmouth men’s basketball team, which held a certified vote to unionize that the university appealed. But following President Donald Trump’s re-election, all of them withdrew their cases due to concern that the new administration would fire Abruzzo (which it did, on Tuesday) and install less union-friendly NLRB board members.
Separately, there is an ongoing court case, Johnson v. NCAA, about the question of athletes as employees, and the plaintiffs have gained several favorable rulings thus far. But it could still be years before that process fully plays out, during which time the climate will keep changing. And college leaders continue to hold out hope that Congress, which is now controlled by the Republican party, will grant them a sweeping antitrust exemption that would uphold athletes’ non-employee status.
So likely the only path to collective bargaining anytime soon would have to come voluntarily on the part of schools, which have thus far showed zero interest. Perhaps that changes in coming years if it becomes clear Congress is not going to provide help, and if the NIL/portal era becomes more destabilizing.
I get why schools oppose athletes becoming employees. I’m mixed about it myself. It would fundamentally change the collegiate model, and, perhaps more importantly, cost schools a fortune in salaries and benefits. But the irony is, a lot of the things they complain about most — players changing schools so frequently, unregulated NIL deals, the need for a salary cap — could be addressed directly if they just negotiated them with the athletes.
What are we gonna do for the next seven months? — Marc S.
Never fear. College softball begins next Friday.
(Photo: Butch Dill / Getty Images)
