100-Day Countdown: 2026 College Football Season Preview

100 Days Out: College football storylines, predictions, names to know heading into 2026 season

Let's celebrate that we are 100 days away from the kickoff of the 2026 college football schedule

By Chip Patterson

May 21, 2026 at 9:00 am ET • 32 min read

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In a tradition that stretches back to 2014, it is our pleasure here at CBS Sports to celebrate a landmark of the college football offseason with a comprehensive collection of stories, predictions, burning questions, names and games to note for the upcoming season. This 100-Day Countdown is a checkpoint that lets us know that soon we will be listening to coaches at media days, making our win totals predictions and turning our attention to fall camp. Spring practice is in the books, we have already re-ranked the full FBS landscape with a new CBS Sports 138, and now it's time to dive into the nitty-gritty.

Our 100-Day countdown looks ahead to Week Zero, which features six FBS games and seven power conference teams in action, including an ACC showdown in Brazil between Virginia and NC State and a Bill Belichick-Sonny Dykes rematch overseas in Ireland. We will also get to see Lincoln Riley's USC squad kickstart a pivotal Year 5 with returning starting quarterback Jayden Maiava and a pair of potential playoff party crashers squaring off when Memphis visits UNLV . So while Week Zero will not feature every team in action like Week 1, the games still count, and there is enough compelling material to declare it the kickoff of our 2026 season.

So let's get it started with storylines, followed by bold predictions, burning questions and more, looking ahead to the upcoming college football season.

Prominent storylines

1. Lane Kiffin and LSU as college football's lightning rod for 2026

There are now 138 head coaches and tens of thousands of individuals represented among the players, assistants and staffers at the FBS level of college football, but there is only one Lane Kiffin. Perhaps we should have known that the entire sport was in the palm of his hand when the flight patterns of his private jet were being reported as though we were living a LeBron James free agency summer with Lane's decisions between Ole Miss , Florida and LSU. The decision to leave the Rebels for a bitter conference rival is a touchstone event in SEC lore that will live on for decades, but it's also a national college football story because of Lane Kiffin as a character and the proven potential for LSU's ceiling with talent. After bemoaning the cost of buyouts as bad business, LSU gifted Kiffin with a lucrative contract and then spent millions to assemble the No. 1 transfer portal class in the country. Kiffin also poached some of the top coaches and players from Ole Miss, bringing the transactional nature of the sport to Front Street for fans who might yearn for the sport's more relationship-based past.

Lane Kiffin has always been a main character in college football, and LSU has been a fixture of the sport's national ascension in the 21st century; the marriage of the two has also included brazen examples of how much the sport has changed. If you've got tens of millions of dollars and a program that is one of the "haves" in college football, you too can rework your entire outlook in a single offseason.

When Kiffin departed Tennessee for USC after just one season in 2009, the hatred from Knoxville was palpable for years and re-ignited in the form of a mustard bottle and other debris more than a decade later. But he took over a program in the midst of NCAA sanctions and certainly did not have the ability to construct a roster as he has at LSU. The Trojans were somewhat off the national radar, so the chaos created by the job jump dissipated over time before he was unceremoniously fired five games into his fourth season in 2013. At LSU, Kiffin has one of the most talented rosters in the country, and the expectations are that the Tigers will compete for a College Football Playoff spot immediately. There's nothing "off the radar" about any of Kiffin's 2026 outlook, because every outcome will be a referendum on everyone involved. Week 1 opens at home against Clemson in one of the biggest games of Labor Day weekend, and the regular season will be highlighted by visits to vengeful former employers (Ole Miss on Sept. 19, Tennessee on Nov. 21) and home games in Baton Rouge against other playoff contenders ( Alabama and Texas in back-to-back weeks in November).

If you got worn out by non-stop Kiffin talk throughout his lengthy courting process, prepare yourself for even higher doses of Kiffin Mania when it comes to judging his debut season on the biggest stages at the end of the year. The thin line between success and failure will be drawn when the bracket is set in December, and once the games start this fall, the pomp will flip to pressure as college football's star boy seeks to fulfill the wildest dreams of an LSU fan base that expects a return on its investment.

2. How Indiana backs up its sport-shaking ascent to the top of college football

Part of the context for those aforementioned Lane Kiffin expectations is what Curt Cignetti has accomplished at Indiana over the last two seasons. The Hoosiers' position as one of the least successful power conference programs in college football was well-documented as Cignetti turned a three-win team into a College Football Playoff team in 2024, but the 16-0 run through a tougher path on the way to a national championship in 2025 truly solidified this tale as an all-timer. So, after losing the Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 overall draft pick at quarterback, along with numerous other key pieces from the success of the last two seasons, will Indiana regress or reload?

One thing undersold during Cignetti's first season in the Big Ten that has since been highlighted is how Indiana activated its massive fan base to capitalize on the new financial realities of college football. Cignetti arrived with a large collection of players from James Madison , and also added key pieces from the transfer portal who proved to be perfect fits for their program. The on-field success certainly raised the Hoosiers' recruiting acumen, but there has also been an intentionality in the kinds of players Cignetti and his staff want to bring into the fold. Indiana has money to spend, but it's not going to get caught in a bidding war for highly rated players who don't align with its evaluation of them as a good fit. Indiana's first transfer class under Cignetti ranked 30th with 31 players; the second ranked 25th with 23 players. As the Hoosiers were beginning their preparation for a title run, they were also cleaning up in the portal during this past offseason, signing a class that ranks 8th with just 17 players.

The number of players needed is going down, and the quality of players is going up because Indiana no longer needs to rebuild. This is a re-loading situation akin to the days of the four-team playoff era, when five teams combined for 29 of the 40 available spots in the bracket. For a decade, it was nearly a guarantee that some combination of Alabama, Georgia , Clemson, Oklahoma and Ohio State would have a seat at the table competing for the title. Indiana is a team of that caliber for this era, so yes, the expectation is the Hoosiers will be back in the College Football Playoff for a third straight season.

3. Ohio State and Texas fell short of expectations, but will start the year in the spotlight again

There is a notion that expanding from 12 to 24 teams will cheapen the regular season of college football, but Ohio State's 2025 season might prove that we've already stripped some lasting meaning from the weeks between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. Ohio State was a monster last season, going 12-0 as they beat teams by 29.2 points per game behind a defense that only allowed more than 14 points once (16 points to Illinois ) and with a quarterback who was a Heisman Trophy finalist after flirting with the NCAA single-season completion percentage record. Even more, the Buckeyes snapped their losing streak to Michigan with a boa constrictor-like suffocation of the Wolverines in the Big House at the end of the year. Everything from the 12-game regular season experience for Ohio State was an undeniable success, yet the lingering feeling when Ryan Day and the Buckeyes walked off the field for the final time in 2025-26 was stinging disappointment. Because while 12-0 will always be a goal in Columbus, the current postseason structure we already have in place puts more weight on what happens in game 13 and beyond. At Ohio State, that 0-2 postseason record, a 13-10 loss to Indiana in the Big Ten Championship Game and a 24-14 loss to Miami in the College Football Playoff, seems heavier than any success prior to December. The 2026 season for Ohio State, with Julian Sayin and Jeremiah Smith leading the revenge tour, will be all about positioning for the playoff and eventually pursuing the postseason success that was absent from last year's campaign.

Part of that positioning includes another massive showdown against Texas.

Last year opened with Ohio State riding that defensive excellence to grind out a 14-7 win against the Longhorns in Columbus. This year, the game will be in Week 2, in Austin, against a Texas team that has surrounded Arch Manning with loads of skill-position talent to gain an edge on Ohio State and the top SEC defenses standing in their way. The Longhorns' disappointment came before the postseason, as a 9-3 record was not good enough to contend for the College Football Playoff, and a Cheez-It Bowl win against Michigan was empty calories for a team good enough to compete against the best. Texas beat two CFP teams last year by double-digits (Oklahoma and Texas A&M), so the storylines and pressure for the 2026 campaign start with getting revenge against Ohio State and flipping the result that could have propelled Steve Sarkisian's program back into the playoff.

The all-in approach to the transfer portal and buzz for the season also reflects the understanding that Texas has one more year with Manning, who is expected to finally cash in on that NFL Draft expectation in April 2027. An early enrollee back in January 2023, Manning has spent four years writing the early chapters of his own football legacy. He wowed in spring games and spot starts while playing backup to Quinn Ewers, then found himself under scrutiny early as a starter before finishing 2025 as a solid power conference quarterback. Manning's 26 passing touchdowns to seven interceptions was the 20th-best touchdown-to-interception ratio in the country, but his passer rating (144.9) and completion percentage (61.4%) were both outside the top 40. The athleticism was certainly a weapon (10 rushing touchdowns), but there's another level of dominance that fans are looking for out of a player who arrived in college with a nearly-perfect prospect rating, not to mention his last name. Manning's last dance with Texas tunes up nicely with Ohio State's bounce-back effort, since their intertwined redemption storylines will collide in Week 2 and continue throughout the season.

4. Notre Dame's narrow margin between success and failure

The Fighting Irish will almost certainly begin the season as a top 10 team in college football, marking the sixth time in the last seven seasons that the program has started the year inside the top 10 of the AP Top 25 poll. But this season is different because expectations for how Notre Dame stacks up against its competition on the schedule and in the sport are as high as they have been in 20 years. Marcus Freeman has built a modern power in South Bend, and while the scars of last season's College Football Playoff snub will be a narrative through the year, it will only add to the pressure for the 2026 team to be in the mix for a national championship. Notre Dame checked in solidly at No. 4 in our post-spring CBS Sports 138, and i

_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/college-football-2026-storylines-predictions-100-days-out/)._