Who returns to the College Football Playoff first: Kalen Deboer, Lincoln Riley, Brian Kelly or Luke Fickell?

The teams playing in regular bowls are already trying to figure out how to play in the College Football Playoff next year, and you have questions…

From Craig:
Rank these coaches who made the College Football Playoff at a different school by the likelihood they will give their new employer the gift of CFP appearances: Kalen DeBoer, Luke Fickell, Brian Kelly, Lincoln Riley.

This is a great question, because half of this list feels like it’s in a very different place than the other half — and if you’d asked me this a year ago I probably would have felt as if all four were in fairly similar places.

Let’s rank them…

1. Kalen DeBoer, Alabama: DeBoer took Washington to the national title game last season, but a three-loss first season at Alabama — with a loss to 6-6 Vanderbilt and a 24-3 drubbing by 6-6 Oklahoma — introduced some doubt as to whether DeBoer can inspire the Crimson Tide to play with the same kind of week-to-week consistency predecessor Nick Saban did. I’m not sure any coach will inspire the same week-to-week consistency that Saban did, but just don’t lose to Vandy.

If DeBoer can iron out some of the dips in motivation, the Tide should be talented enough to compete for SEC titles and make the CFP. Alabama finished No. 2 in the On3 Industry rankings for the recruiting class of 2025, and though athletic director Greg Byrne sounded the alarm about teams trying to cherry-pick players off Alabama’s roster, Alabama still will be one of the five most talented teams in the country next season.

2. Brian Kelly, LSU: The trend line pointed down for Kelly toward the end of this season as it became clear the Tigers still didn’t have a good enough roster to compete for the SEC title. Kelly can blame Ed Orgeron all he wants, but if you’re not good enough in year three, it’s your fault. The good news for LSU is that even though the Tigers lost quarterback commit Bryce Underwood to Michigan, they still signed a top-10 class. More important, the Tigers have been players in the transfer portal. Kelly got lampooned last offseason for saying he doesn’t “buy players” when asked about LSU’s inaction in the spring portal. What he meant was the particular players available probably weren’t worth the price tag.

Kelly and company are absolutely buying players this offseason, and they’re attacking positions of need. They grabbed cornerback Mansoor Delane from Virginia Tech. They grabbed edge rushers Jimari Butler (Nebraska), Patrick Payton (Florida State) and Jack Pyburn (Florida). They grabbed receivers Barrion Brown (Kentucky) and Nic Anderson (Oklahoma). 

The Tigers seem serious about upgrading the roster, and Kelly has shown through the years that when the talent is close, he tends to win. 

3. Lincoln Riley, USC: I haven’t completely given up on Riley, but I may be in the minority at this point. USC’s talent level has dropped each year since he arrived, and it doesn’t appear that this offseason will net out positively either.

The glass-half-full view of Riley is that five of USC’s six losses were by a touchdown or fewer and four were by three points or fewer. Perhaps USC was just on the verge of a breakthrough.

The glass-half-empty view is that Riley’s best Oklahoma team was his first (2017) and that his best USC team was his first (2022). So expecting improvement at this point is to ignore history.

4. Luke Fickell, Wisconsin: I take no joy in ranking Fickell fourth out of four on this list, but his Wisconsin tenure has been an abject disappointment to this point. After watching him take Cincinnati to the four-team CFP in 2021 — after building what looked like a sustainable winner — it seemed like a perfect fit.

Wisconsin was always just this close, and all it needed was a coach who could occasionally recruit above his level for a few key players to generate the one or two more wins the Badgers would need to be consistent 12-team CFP participants. But after Fickell went 7-6 in 2023 and 5-7 in 2024, it’s fair to ask whether he’s capable of getting the Badgers there.

Let’s not forget that one of the assistants who helped build that Cincinnati program was Marcus Freeman, who left to become Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator before the 2021 season. Freeman, now Notre Dame’s head coach, is currently stocking Notre Dame with talent at a higher level than his predecessors did. Maybe Freeman deserves more credit. The offensive coordinator for those Cincinnati teams was Mike Denbrock, who helped Jayden Daniels win a Heisman Trophy at LSU and who helped Freeman and the Fighting Irish make the CFP this year. Maybe Denbrock deserves more credit. (To add insult to injury with the Notre Dame comparison, top Wisconsin receiver Will Pauling is transferring to Notre Dame to reunite with position coach Mike Brown, who himself reunited with Denbrock a year ago.)

Fickell fired Air Raid offensive coordinator Phil Longo and replaced him with Jeff Grimes, a longtime coordinator who came up as an offensive line coach. That suggests Fickell intends to lean into Wisconsin’s greatest natural resource (huge people who can move other huge people) and play more similarly to the way Barry Alvarez, Bret Bielema and Paul Chryst played. That’s probably a good start, because that worked well across eras. 

Wisconsin has taken Maryland transfer Billy Edwards Jr. and San Diego State transfer Danny O’Neil to stock the QB room, but Fickell and company need to be more aggressive about increasing the talent level on the roster. Wisconsin, like most Big Ten schools, is rich by comparison to most of the FBS. There is no excuse for the Badgers to not be major players on the transfer market.

From Rich:
This may have been discussed in all the CFP first-round fallout but why aren’t the teams and conferences, particularly the Big Ten and SEC, held responsible for folks’ dissatisfaction? If the latest realignment hadn’t happened, the top four seeds would have been Pac 12 champ Oregon, SEC champ Georgia, Big 12 champ Texas and Big Ten champ Penn State or Ohio State. Boise would have gotten the fifth conference bid over Clemson and the first-round matchups would have been more competitive. 

The conferences made moves to try and game the playoff system and it bit them in the ass. No real sympathy for those being greedy.

I disagree with Rich that the conferences made moves to game the CFP system. The Big Ten and SEC made moves to amass wealth and power, plain and simple. The Big 12 and ACC just did their best to survive. The Pac-12 leadership across the tenure of two commissioners made poor calculations relative to the rest of the landscape and tanked a fantastic brand. And all of the moves of the latter three were in response to the wealth-and-power grab by the Big Ten and SEC.

Did it bite them in the ass in terms of the CFP? Absolutely. As Rich points out, this CFP format was intended for a world with five power conferences. Remember, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, then-Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, then-Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson and then-Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick were tasked in January 2019 with revamping the system. At that time, negotiations between Oklahoma, Texas and the SEC were two years away. The UCLA/USC move to the Big Ten was three years away. No one thought the Pac-12 leadership would be dumb enough to let the conference implode.

Other factors — specifically NIL and the change in transfer rules — have dramatically changed the sport in the meantime, but for once those two things aren’t at fault. The awkwardness of this playoff, with its deliberate mis-seeding that wound up punishing Oregon and Georgia for winning their conference title games and rewarding Penn State and Texas for losing, is a direct result of realignment. 

The system was designed for more balanced conferences. It wasn’t designed for the Big Ten and SEC to be in a league of their own. 

History tells us the consolidation will continue, so it will be interesting to see how the commissioners change the CFP format prior to the 2026 season when the new CFP media rights deal begins. It’s probably safe to assume there will be more conference alignment changes to follow, so perhaps they should take that into account before they change anything too drastically.

From Jeff:
Let’s say the On3 Andy & Ari Saucy Nuggs Bowl becomes a reality. Can we spice it up with some fun rule changes? Maybe UFL style extra points, or “Make It, Take It” scoring. What are some rule changes, that could actually be implemented, would you like to see in your game?

I love this idea. As Ari Wasserman and I watched the Myrtle Beach Bowl last week, we imagined what it would be like to be in the booth looking down on a teal field as our producer River Bailey and On3 newshound Pete Nakos roamed the sidelines. 

I like the idea of Make It Take It scoring, but I fear the NCAA wouldn’t certify our game if we went that far. What if we just eliminated extra point kicks and forced teams to try a two-point conversion after every touchdown? They do this in overtime. Why not try it in regulation and reward the teams with better goal line offenses?

Also, I’d use the occasion of my very own bowl game to attempt to correct the dumbest rule in college football: You’re down even though no one touched you. In the On3 Andy and Ari Saucy Nuggs Bowl presented by Wendy’s, you’re not down until someone touches you. If the QB slips and his knee hits the ground, it’s not a sack. If you make a diving catch and there’s no defender around, get up and keep running. I know a lot of you have decried the NFL-ization of college football, but this was always a rule the NFL got right and college got wrong. If you’re old enough to enlist in the military, you’re old enough to not be down just because you dove.

And of course we’d have a far superior halftime contest to the Dr. Pepper Chest Pass Challenge.

We’re going to call it Joe vs. College.

Yes, we’re going to completely rip off the concept of Pros vs. Joes, only this time the Pros will be players who are currently participating in the game.

A member of the student body of each participating school will be put in uniform and given a football at the 10-yard line. One of their team’s linebackers will be on the field. If the student reaches the end zone, they win $100,000. If the student gets tackled before reaching the end zone, the player gets $100,000. If the student gets maimed, oh well. They signed all the requisite forms.

And these aren’t scholarships like the prizes in the Dr. Pepper Chest Pass Challenge. This is cold cash. If the student or the player wants to blow it all on booze and airbrushed T-shirts after the game, we don’t care. It’s their money.

A Random Ranking

In keeping with Jeff’s question, I’m going to rank the bowls — past or present — that I’d most like Wendy’s and /or On3 to pay for us to sponsor.

1. The Bahamas Bowl
2. The Bacardi Bowl 
3. The Aloha Bowl
4. The Myrtle Beach Bowl
5. The International Bowl 
6. The New Orleans Bowl
7. The bowl in Charlotte (because mayo is Satan’s pomade)
8. The Bluebonnet Bowl (still in the Astrodome, of course)
9. The Boardwalk Bowl (played in the Atlantic City Convention Center)
10. The Rose Bowl