College football: Biggest brands dominating list of favorites once again

Headline after headline during the offseason spoke to the same reality for college football: Millions of dollars are headed directly into the pockets of players and only programs that can nimbly recalibrate and replenish their resources will succeed. Now, with preseason camps winding down and opening kickoffs approaching, a different reality hits: The more things change, the more they stay the same. The preseason AP Top 25 for 2025 could have just as easily come from 1975. The first official season of revenue sharing between schools and their players in the new name, image and likeness era of college sports is sorting programs into familiar categories. The first includes college football's biggest brands, which are dominating the list of favorites once again: No. 1 Texas, No. 2 Penn State, No. 3 Ohio State and No. 4 Clemson. Second are teams we've talked about over the past few decades that are using money and celebrity coaches to elbow their way into the conversation: Colorado, North Carolina and No. 23 Texas Tech. And then there are those who see the second year of the 12-team playoff and a different playing field created by revenue sharing and think they might be able to fashion a turnaround not unlike No. 20 Indiana's worst to (almost) first resurgence last year: Pick a name, any name, but a good starting point might be UCLA (now with star QB Nico Iamaleava ) or Virginia (which, like Indiana last year, avoids pretty much every top team on its conference schedule). Jeffrey Kessler, the attorney who helped broker the massive legal settlement that compelled virtually all schools eligible for the playoff to share millions with their athletes, says these times remind him of the early 1990s, when the NFL introduced unrestricted free agency and the salary cap. "It's a big change," Kessler said. "But I think the system will adapt and the better-managed athletic departments will do well, as they always do. And athletic departments that are poorly managed won't do so well, and probably didn't do so well in the old system, either." Heisman watch equals title watch Pay or no pay, one thing hasn't changed in college football or any sport: Great players win games. It's no big surprise, then, to see Texas at the top of almost everyone's watch list. Leading the Longhorns is none other than Arch Manning, the sophomore quarterback with the reported $6 million-plus NIL deal, and the latest burgeoning star in a family that has produced lots of them, from Archie to Peyton to Eli. "For Arch, he grew up in this era of seeing high-level football," Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said. "He's watched Super Bowls. He's watched gold jackets getting put on. He's been to playoff games. He's been recruited at the highest level as the No. 1 player in the country." Though it doesn't always work out, there are plenty of schools where a player with hopes of winning the Heisman Trophy also will have a legitimate chance to win the CFP. Besides Manning, other favorites include receiver Jeremiah Smith, whose success with defending champion Ohio State figures to depend a lot on whether the Buckeyes' next quarterback, Julian Sayin, who is also in the Heisman mix, is as good as advertised. Clemson QB Cade Klubnik is among the favorites, as are the Tigers for a repeat title in the ACC. Quarterback Drew Allar is in his fourth season at Penn State, where the Nittany Lions are expected to face Ohio State for the Big Ten title (They play Nov. 1, and coach James Franklin is 1-10 against the Buckeyes). Meanwhile, LSU appears to be only a secondary threat to Texas as Georgia and Alabama are in the SEC, but Garrett Nussmeier is in that Heisman mix and can stay there with a good performance against Klubnik and Clemson on Aug. 30. Is the hype machine same as the win machine? Nobody has defined this new era of NIL as much as Colorado coach Deion Sanders. Sanders brought his unapologetic swagger to a program that had been in the dumps for decades. He made the Buffaloes relevant, producing TV ratings, celebrity sightings, a Heisman winner in Travis Hunter and maybe the most talked-about player in the sport in his own son, Shedeur, whose tumble to the fifth round of the NFL draft said as much about his talent as the football-loving public's reaction to a new era in which players hold more power. Winning? That was another thing. Deion Sanders is 13-12 over his two seasons, and now that Hunter and Shedeur are gone, the only big expectations for CU are coming from Boulder. "The next phase is we're going to win differently, but we're going to win," Sanders said. Another celebrity coach, Bill Belichick, will start answering the question of whether fans and wins will follow him to North Carolina, a school where the excitement often doesn't ramp up until basketball season. The 73-year-old coach said he was building an NFL-style program — meaning everything he does, from nutrition to training to, yes, contracts, will look more like the pros. It was the sort of notion that used to be spoken softly but can now be used as a selling point. "Everything we do here is predicated on building a pro team," said Carolina's new general manager, Mike Lombardi, who worked with Belichick in the pros. "We consider ourselves the 33rd (NFL) team because everybody who's involved with our program has had some form or aspect in pro football." Over in Lubbock, Texas, the Texas Tech athletic program has never been afraid to swing big. The program that gave us swashbuckling coach Mike Leach and Super Bowl quarterback Patrick Mahomes is being bankrolled by the billionaire head of its board of regents, Cody Campbell, who now has the school's football field named after him. Texas Tech has made a series of high-profile and expensive player signings — some for high schoolers who haven't arrived yet — and is estimated to be spending more on NIL than any program in the country besides Texas. "I know there's a lot of expectations on this team," said coach Joey McGuire, who is coming off an 8-5 season. "We look at it as opportunities." Do new payrolls mean even footing for everyone? The new world of revenue sharing and an expanded playoff does give more reason for hope across the country. When searching for blueprints of how that can work, most long-suffering programs will look to Indiana. The Hoosiers were an also-ran for decades, with one Rose Bowl appearance ever and one winning record in a non-COVID-19 season since 1995. Then coach Curt Cignetti arrived, brought 54 new players from the transfer portal and turned Indiana into a winner overnight. It was a remarkable turnaround that ran counter to the realities seen in these stats: There are 70 teams that make up the Power Four conferences, plus Pac-12 leftovers Oregon State and Washington State. Since 2000, 36 of those teams have captured a total of 137 outright or shared league titles that have been won between the five largest conferences. Of those 137 titles, 92 (67%) have been captured by 10 programs that have won five or more. The other 26 have combined to win 45. That leaves 34 programs (48.5%) that haven't won any. In the NFL over the same period, only 10 teams (31%) have failed to reach the Super Bowl. Those numbers reflect how hard it is to break through in big-time college football but also the size of the glass ceiling that could be shattered in this new era of college sports. "I think the rev-share world definitely has a chance to bring things to a more balanced circumstance," said Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinksi, whose football program has a new coach, Barry Odom, after going 1-11 last season. "Will there always be some programs that operate in a little bit of a different reality? Of course. But we're not concerned about that, nor are we crying in our beer about that. We've just got to find a way."