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This week, CBS Sports has been celebrating the midpoint of the 2026 college football season. We have honored the best and brightest with a Midseason All-America Team, given the experts a chance to redo their predictions for how the season will end in the College Football Playoff, and taken the time to offer a midseason report card for every power conference team.
The key word here is celebrate, because while it's easy to get caught up in complaining about a coach, quarterback or playoff format, college football still overwhelms us with names, games and storylines worth debating and celebrating every week. When there's a chaotic Saturday like in Week 7 with five of the top seven teams going down in a 12-hour span, we celebrate it. It hasn't mattered whether we had poll champions, BCS champions or any number of playoff formats; those stories have been a driving reason behind college football's popularity.
But to be fair to complaining as an institution, complaining is nothing new in college football.
We complain about the quarterback who can't convert on deep passes, the offensive coordinator who isn't calling the right plays and the defense that just can't get off the field on third down. We complain about officials (a lot) and lightning delays (seemingly a lot more than we used to).
Complaining has also driven a lot of the changes in college football. It both brought about the BCS after years of split champions and then tore it down, leading to the four-team CFP that was soon expanded again after complaints about access. The cries for "more" and "now" seem to have us headed for another change, kickstarting a visceral response of complaints about the impact of expansion.
I know college football needs debates, hypotheticals and yes, even some complaints to fuel the conversation around the sport. But I also know that it's not fair to the players, coaches, staffers and families to overload the conversation with complaining -- especially if it takes away from the celebrating.
College football in 2026 has been a blast, and the second half of the season is going to pack even more of a punch. Getting to watch, talk and think about this sport is such a privilege; we'd hate to see anyone waste that privilege on complaining. The sport's suits can figure out playoff formats and roster caps in boardrooms on someone else's dime, because right now we're only focusing on the storylines that will drive the action on the field during the stretch run of the 2026 season.
Ryan Day's outlook on Julian Sayin's recovery suggests that any projection for the Buckeyes must include the possibility, if not the likelihood, that he won't make it back this season. No one has attempted to set a timetable yet, but if we're trying to make our midseason predictions, you must consider that it's either going to be Luke Fahey or Tavien St. Clair as QB1 in key games down the stretch against USC, Oregon, Northwestern, Nebraska and Michigan.
Did you notice that list of five opponents? They're all top-50 teams, and their current combined record is 24-8. Every single one of the remaining games is losable individually for Ohio State, but the Buckeyes' track record suggests the standard is too high to let the entire team fall apart with one injury. This is the program, after all, that was down to its third quarterback when Cardale Jones stepped up to lead a national title run in 2014-15.
Something is undeniably lost with Julian Sayin's talent and the experience he's gained from the high-level games of the two seasons, but Ohio State is among the few programs you'd still trust to endure the setback and have a shot at winning it all if it can make the CFP.
It's always something with Texas.
It's the playcalling, the injuries, the turnovers or any number of reasons why the Longhorns have not been meeting their expectations since the start of last season. Texas reached the CFPsemifinals in both the 2023 and 2024 seasons, so the transition to the Arch Manning era was expected to unlock the next step in its bid to win it all.
Texas finishing last season in the Cheez-It Bowl with a roster built to win it all was a disappointment, and having two losses through seven weeks suggests 2026 could also be a disappointment. Not all is lost in Austin for Sark and Arch, but the margin for error is razor thin, and the road ahead includes plenty of landmines.
Because Arch, Sark and the Longhorns had that incredible comeback win against Ohio State, there is a built-in bonus to how Texas will be viewed as an at-large candidate for the CFP. But with Ole Miss coming to town on Saturday and road trips to Missouri and LSU in November, there are more than a couple of obvious spots where the Longhorns could take another loss. If the offense does not take a significant step forward with the pressure being at its peak, things could get really uncomfortable in Austin.
There are nine teams currently in the AP Top 25 poll from the SEC, and odds suggest that half of them (four or five) will end up making the College Football Playoff. The most enticing and anxiety-riddled storyline for many rabid fan bases is who will win the remaining pivotal matchups that will set this chaotic SEC race in motion.
Consider that Kentucky already has a win against LSU but a loss to Alabama, which has losses to Tennessee and Georgia, as well as that win against the Wildcats. The criss-crossing nature of these head-to-head contradictions could fill a conspiracy theory board, but we're going to try and isolate the most important matchups in the SEC and CFP race.
It's simple enough to explain but emotionally exhausting to consider. These 10 games are likely to determine, through both their own head-to-head results and tiebreaker implications, who gets to play in the SEC Championship Game and who makes the CFP. The teams that lose more of these games than they win will be celebrating the traditional bowl system as we know it for at least one more year, while the winners will have advantages as long as they handle business in their remaining games.
Of course, last week's results and our knowledge of the shrinking talent gap tell us no game is a layup, especially in the SEC. But those 10 games set up now as a good watch list for how the winners will separate themselves in a conference crowded with contenders.
Miami just took over the No. 1 spot in the college football rankings, setting up a couple of weekends where the Hurricanes get to live in the rarefied air of the top spot. It's a position that Miami has not held since 2002, so we really don't have a sense of what "The U" looks like in the modern era, carrying the expectations of being the best team in the country.
The Hurricanes will start by testing that status against a Pitt team without its star quarterback, and then on the road against Bill Belichick and North Carolina. But if Miami can navigate through those two foes without a misstep, then it sets up a colossal collision in South Bend against Notre Dame.
The fact that Miami and Notre Dame are running hot at the same time is a welcome renewal of a rivalry that once defined the national championship conversation. And after last season's Miami-Notre Dame CFP rankings flip-flop, this latest chapter in the rivalry includes drama and revenge.
The fact that Notre Dame has already lost once this season only raises the stakes of that Nov. 7 showdown, which will serve as a "prove-it" moment for the Fighting Irish in the eyes of the Selection Committee. With the Big 12 looking heavy at the top and a pack of SEC teams carrying good non-conference wins, Notre Dame could benefit greatly from having a high-quality win to secure an at-large bid.
USC and UCLA are both in the top four of the Big Ten standings through four games, each with a fair shot at competing for a Big Ten title and a spot in the CFP. Yet the outlook for both teams, a combined 7-1 in league play, comes with injury concerns and the uncertainty of a tougher stretch ahead in the second half of the schedule.
USC still has to play Ohio State and Indiana while UCLA has a more manageable path, but the Bruins (like Ohio State) are keeping their CFP hopes alive with a backup quarterback. Ty Diefenbach stepped in for Nico Iamaleava effectively in the win over Oregon and led the team to a victory over Wisconsin. But UCLA's playoff hopes will ride on its run game and defense, which together set a high floor for what the Bruins can accomplish without Nico.
USC's injury issues have hit most positions other than quarterback, with offensive linemen going down early and pass catchers swapping in and out throughout the first weeks of the season.
The off week should provide some help on that front, but we await to see just how healthy the team is when USC returns to action in Week 8. Gary Patterson is going to need his defense, which has had a good October against a pair of struggling offenses, to create the same game-changing plays against much tougher competition in the weeks ahead.
For UCLA, you have Year 1 Bob Chensey putting together a Coach of the Year argument, while on the other side of town Lincoln Riley is in Year 5 and still looking for his first CFP appearance with the Trojans. UCLA is 6-0 overall and 4-0 in Big Ten play while USC is 5-1 overall and 3-1 in Big Ten play, but any hopeful postseason path for both likely needs a win against the other. That breathes new life into this crosstown rivalry, and ramps up the pressure on one of these coaches to make a statement when they meet on the field on Nov. 28.
Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark has said his conference is "in the events business" and even struck a deal with WWE to award a wrestling-style title belt to the winner of the Big 12 title game. Well, Commissioner Yormark, may I suggest a Royal Rumble? Maybe a four-way ladder match to determine who will emerge as the conference champion? Because right now we have four stellar Big 12 teams, all sitting inside the top 15 of the AP Top 25 poll, and not a ton of cross-over on the schedule to give us head-to-head results.
No. 8 Texas Tech already has a great win against No. 14 Houston, but will not face BYU or Utah in the regular season. From that perspective, the Red Raiders have pulled their weight and now just need to handle business the rest of the way.
No. 10 Utah has yet to play a top-50 team, but the Utes will have their time with a visit from Houston this weekend and then the Holy War rivalry against BYU on Nov. 7.
And No. 2 BYU, which very clearly has one of the best wins in the country after beating Notre Dame, similarly does not play Houston or Texas Tech but will clash with rival Utah early next month.
That absence of crossover results will create a real headache in figuring out both who will make the Big 12 title game and which teams deserve the best spots in the CFP. The bad news for the SEC, Big Ten and ACC is that a lot of preseason projections saw the Big 12 as a one-bid league, but with four teams in the top 15 and three in the top 10 at the midseason point, we've got a decent chance the conference finds itself with as many as three teams in the final bracket.
Maryland officially ended the Mike Locksley era this week, parting ways with the coach who had been leading the Terps since the 2019 season. It's the first power conference job to open in the 2026-27 cycle, and has prompted some larger conversations about what kind of spinning we should expect from the coaching carousel. Last season, we had UCLA, Virginia Tech, Arkansas and Penn State all open at this point in the calendar, and LSU would soon follow suit before the end of October. Auburn opened in early November, followed by Florida and eventually Kentucky and Michigan State as well. With so many power conference jobs changing hands last year, the thought (at least through a quiet September on the coaching carousel) was that we would see less coaching carnage this go around.
All eyes are on Mike Norvell at Florida State, as the Seminoles' effort and performances seem to be a week-to-week indicator of his hot-seat status, but both in Tallahassee and in several spots around the country, the appetite to make a change is being questioned. If Shane Beamer, Luke Fickell and Dave Doeren are able to throw a few more signature wins on the card, we could see a lot of those names from the hot seat outlook back for 2027.
There is, however, a path for this coaching carousel to get very silly, but it will need a few more disappointing results and boatloads of money. There are larger, existential questions at blue blood programs like USC and Texas, which, as we discussed above, are under immense pressure to contend for championships with high-dollar rosters and high-dollar coaches.
Those coaches would demand equally expensive buyouts, so it would take some serious disappointment to motivate the financial commitment to a change. But if you want to know how a quiet coaching carousel turns into a frenzy, it would start with one of those schools deciding to join Maryland on the ride.
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