Penn State under Schiano, Georgia with its largest returning class in years, LSU in its first spring under Charlie Strong. The evaluation season begins.
Spring practice windows open across the Power 4 in March, and the programs that moved fastest — either in the hiring cycle or in the portal — will enter those eight weeks with a real advantage over organizations still assembling their rosters. The most interesting spring to watch is at Penn State, where James Franklin's abrupt mid-season departure and the hire of Greg Schiano has created genuine uncertainty about what direction the program is heading. Schiano built Rutgers into a competitive program twice, so the pedigree is there. What isn't there yet is any clarity about whether Penn State's returning roster fits what Schiano wants to do. The spring will answer that question, but it will do so publicly, in front of a fan base that is still processing what happened in October.
The recruiting response has exceeded expectations. The scheme installation is a work in progress. Spring will answer the remaining questions.
Bill Belichick is entering his second full offseason at North Carolina, and the program is beginning to show the fingerprints of a coach who spent six decades studying football at its highest level. The first year was, by Belichick's own admission in his postseason press conference, a process year. Installing a defensive system built on concepts that NFL players spend entire careers learning — with 18-to-22-year-olds who have had weeks to absorb it — produces predictable growing pains. The Tar Heels gave up too many big plays in coverage and struggled at times with the physical demands of Belichick's base front. That was expected.
Experience beats potential in the portal era — and the quarterbacks who found the right second home proved it again this season.
The 2025 college football season produced another round of evidence that the transfer portal has fundamentally changed the developmental path for quarterbacks — and that the players who find the right second landing spot are producing at a rate that's hard to ignore. Across the Power conferences in 2025, quarterbacks who transferred and found starting positions significantly outperformed their replacement-level projections. This wasn't a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention to the trend, but the volume of success stories in a single season represented a meaningful data point.
The brand infrastructure is real. The football results have been uneven. The 2026 season is when the program's direction becomes clearer.
Three years into the Deion Sanders era at Colorado, the program looks nothing like it did when he arrived — and that transformation is now being studied by athletic departments across the country as much as it's being followed by recruiting services. The numbers tell part of the story. Colorado's athletic budget has grown significantly. Their social media following dwarfs what it was in 2022. NIL deals flowing through the program have made Boulder a legitimate recruiting destination for players who, by traditional metrics, would never have considered the Pac-12 West. What Sanders built isn't just a football program. It's a brand infrastructure attached to a football program.
The Cornhuskers enter spring with momentum, a strong recruiting class, and questions at depth that the next eight weeks will start answering.
Nebraska opens spring practice this weekend, becoming the first Power 4 program to take the field in 2026. That's a distinction the program has held before — Nebraska has one of the stronger spring football traditions in college football — and this year it carries more weight than usual. The Cornhuskers enter the spring with genuine momentum. The 2025 season produced results that the program's fan base hadn't seen in years, and the 2026 recruiting class that came in during January was the most talent-dense group the program has assembled in recent memory. Spring is when that talent begins to be evaluated in pads, in real competition, against real depth charts.
The portal raised the bar for what programs ask of first-year players. These are the recruits entering spring with the most immediate pressure to prove themselves.
The 2026 recruiting class is entering college football programs this spring, and several of the highest-profile recruits in the cycle are walking into situations where the expectation is not that they'll contribute eventually — it's that they'll contribute now. This is the new normal. The transfer portal has created a paradox: while it gives players more movement options, it has also raised the floor of what programs expect from freshmen. When a program can add a veteran portal player at virtually any position at any point in the calendar, the freshman who takes the field in September has already cleared a meaningful threshold. He beat out the portal option. That means something.
Gundy, Franklin, Kelly, Napier, Pittman — all gone before November. The programs that moved quickest are entering spring with the most uncertainty.
The 2025 college football season will be studied for a long time, and not primarily for what happened on the field. The coaching carousel turned at a pace and scale that nobody in the sport had experienced in a single season. Mid-season firings became the norm rather than the exception. Programs that had been stable for years made decisions in October that would have been unthinkable in September. The list is worth sitting with. UCLA and Virginia Tech moved first, in September. Oklahoma State parted with Mike Gundy in late September after more than two decades — one of the longest-tenured head coaches in the Power conferences, gone before Halloween. Arkansas dismissed Sam Pittman shortly after. Penn State fired James Franklin in October. LSU let Brian Kelly go. Florida ended Billy Napier's tenure. Oregon State relieved Trent Bray. UAB fired Trent Dilfer. Colorado State moved on from Jay Norvell.