Five players and two coaches who are no-brainers for the next College Football Hall of Fame class

The big news last week was that the National Football Foundation had amended its criteria to make former Texas Tech, Washington State and Mississippi State coach Mike Leach eligible for the College Football Hall of Fame. But when the NFF released its list of nominees Monday, Leach’s name was nowhere to be found.

But the list of 79 FBS (or Division I-A, depending on their era) players and nine coaches was plenty star-studded. So while we wait another year to give the late pirate the enshrinement he so richly deserves, let’s pick the no-brainers for the 2026 class.

The 2025 class featured 16 FBS players and four coaches. Whittling down the 79 to 16 (or fewer) is going to be a brutal process for NFF members. Every one of these nominees is someone’s favorite player. Deciding between, say, former Iowa quarterback Brad Banks and former Northern Illinois quarterback Jordan Lynch feels like a Sophie’s choice. 

A few of these players and coaches feel obvious, though. Here are five players and two coaches who absolutely should be in the 2026 Hall of Fame class.

Cam Newton, QB, Auburn

Newton only spent one season as an FBS starter, but it probably was the most dominant season any quarterback has ever had. Newton dragged the 2010 Auburn team to an undefeated national title season and won the Heisman Trophy. 

He made some excellent SEC defenses look silly, and the comeback he led at Alabama on Black Friday remains one of the greatest single-game performances ever. 

Sure, that season was shrouded in controversy, but all of the following are true:

• Nothing was ever proven.
  
• Nothing Newton or his family members were accused of doing is against the rules anymore.
  
• Even if every rumor in the legendary As The Plains Burn TigerDroppings.com post turned out to be real, Newton would still have been the biggest bargain in college football history.

Aaron Donald, DT, Pittsburgh

Donald was the best football player on the planet for much of his NFL career, but don’t let that detract from the fact that he probably was more dominant his final two years in college.

Donald’s stat line from the 2013 Georgia Tech game is the stuff of legend. He had 11 tackles (all solo) with six tackles for loss and two forced fumbles. Look at the opponent again. Georgia Tech was a triple option team in 2013. The triple option is designed to gain zero or more yards on every play, and Donald made six tackles for loss. That’s not supposed to be possible. (The Panthers actually lost this game; hey, Donald didn’t play offense.) 

As a senior, Donald won the Bronco Nagurski Trophy, the Chuck Badnarik Award, the Outland Trophy and the Lombardi Trophy. Few defensive tackles have had more dominant seasons, except maybe…

Ndamukong Suh, DT, Nebraska

Former Alabama tailback Mark Ingram also is a nominee this year, and I suspect he and Suh will both make the class. But with all due respect to Ingram, who was incredible in 2009, Suh was the best player in college football that season. Suh was the No. 1 vote on my first ballot as a Heisman Trophy voter because he simply wrecked every offense he played. 

Suh led the Cornhuskers in defensive tackles in 2008 and 2009. His 85 tackles in 2009 were the most by a defensive lineman since 1974. This simply does not happen. Linebackers — and maybe safeties — lead their teams in tackles. Defensive tackles don’t. And Suh did it twice.

As a senior, Suh had 24 tackles for loss, 12 sacks and 26 QB hurries. He also blocked three kicks. The entire college football world watched him singlehandedly dismantle the Texas offense in the 2009 Big 12 title game, but the truth was he’d played exactly like that for most of the previous two seasons.

Percy Harvin, WR, Florida

Ask any player on the roster of the 2006 or 2008 Florida national title teams who the biggest difference-maker on the team was, and I guarantee they’ll all answer Percy Harvin. Tim Tebow, Brandon Spikes, Reggie Nelson and the Pouncey twins all were transcendent players, but everyone was in awe of Harvin.

Harvin was simply different from everyone else in the sport with the ball in his hands. His NFL career — and, to be fair, his Florida career — got sidetracked by debilitating migraine headaches, but he tortured would-be tacklers when healthy. And he was a critical player for two national titles.

Alan Faneca, OG, LSU

This one is personal for me because I had the misfortune of being asked to play Faneca as a scout-teamer on the 1996 Florida team. A grad assistant brought me upstairs the Monday of LSU week and showed me clips of Faneca, who I could only assume was some kind of metahuman. No one that big and strong should have been that smooth or fast. Faneca could pull from the back side of a sweep and erase the playside linebacker by outrunning a future NFL tailback. If you’ve ever attempted to play offensive guard, you probably have some idea how difficult this is. Put a future NFL player at linebacker and it’s nearly impossible. But Faneca made it look easy.

Faneca got me yelled at a lot by defensive coordinator Bob Stoops that week. But if I could have done a hundredth of what Faneca could do, I wouldn’t have been on the scout team in the first place. Faneca proved at LSU and in a Pro Football Hall of Fame career as a Pittsburgh Steeler that he was one of the greatest offensive lineman to ever walk the earth. So naturally he belongs in the College Football Hall of Fame.

Gary Patterson, TCU

Honest question: Is Patterson the best talent evaluator in the history of the sport? I think a lot of coaches would say yes.

Patterson could watch tape of a high school running back and see how the kid might grow into an NFL defensive end. His TCU teams always outpunched their weight, and he led the post-Southwest Conference Horned Frogs through the conference hinterlands and back into the upper echelon of the sport. 

Chris Petersen, Boise State/Washington

At Boise State, Petersen built on a foundation laid by Houston Nutt and Dan Hawkins and created a program few others could have imagined. He engineered one of the greatest comeback wins ever — the Fiesta Bowl against Oklahoma after the 1996 season — and he crafted a consistent winner that played with an imitable style and never backed down from anyone.

Then he went to Washington and retuned the Huskies to the top of the Pac-12. Petersen would have won big anywhere.