Indiana went 16-0 and won the title. Then its Heisman quarterback went first overall. Our ratings still have the Hoosiers fifth — but they also put a number on exactly what walked out the door.
College football returns on 29 August, with North Carolina and TCU opening the year in Dublin. NC State and Virginia meet that same afternoon in Charlottesville — a game that was supposed to be played in Rio de Janeiro, and would have been the first ever staged in South America, until the arrangement collapsed in June and the fixture was moved to Scott Stadium.
The main opening weekend follows over Labor Day, 3-7 September, and it is stacked: Clemson at LSU, Notre Dame and Wisconsin at Lambeau Field, Boise State at Oregon, Louisville and Ole Miss in Nashville, Baylor and Auburn in Atlanta, and SMU at Florida State to close it out on Monday night.
The Associated Press preseason poll does not arrive until 17 August. The Coaches Poll is already out, and it opens with Ohio State at No. 1 on 38 of 72 first-place votes, ahead of Oregon, Georgia, Texas and Notre Dame. Defending champion Indiana sits sixth there, with Miami — the team it beat for the title — seventh. Which leaves one question louder than any poll: what becomes of a team that went unbeaten and then lost the best player in the country.
Indiana's 2025 was not a good season; it was a perfect one. Sixteen wins, no losses, a first national championship won 27-21 against Miami, and a Heisman Trophy for Fernando Mendoza, who threw for 3,535 yards and 41 touchdowns before declaring for the draft and going first overall to the Raiders.
Replacing that is the most conspicuous job in the sport, and Indiana went to the portal for it. Josh Hoover arrives from TCU with 3,472 passing yards and 29 touchdowns of his own — a genuinely accomplished starter, not a stopgap.
Our model is not sentimental about it. Measured in expected points added per play against the starter he replaces, Hoover grades out at minus 0.087 — a downgrade, and one of the larger negative marks in our transfer dataset. That is not a verdict on Hoover. It is a measurement of what a Heisman winner is worth, and it is the single clearest number in this preview.
The Hoosiers still rate fifth in the country on our board. The model thinks Indiana is very good and slightly worse than it was, which is roughly what losing the first pick in the draft ought to look like.
The winter’s biggest move reads stranger the closer you look at the ratings behind it. Lane Kiffin left Ole Miss for LSU in the middle of a playoff push — his one-loss Rebels were bound for the bracket — and offensive coordinator Charlie Weis Jr. ultimately followed him to Baton Rouge after finishing out Ole Miss’s postseason run. Ole Miss promoted its defensive coordinator, Pete Golding, to replace him.
So the sport's most celebrated offensive mind inherits a roster whose defence rates second in the country and whose offence rates twenty-first. And the defensive coach inherits Ole Miss, which rates eleventh on offence and twenty-fifth on defence — the weaker unit being the one he used to run.
Each has been handed a team whose soft side is his own specialism. Kiffin's immediate job is the 21st-rated offence; Golding's is the 25th-rated defence. Both will be tested precisely where their reputations say they should succeed, which is a more demanding place to be judged than it sounds. They are two of thirty-three FBS coaching changes, seventeen of them in the Power Four.
Reported asking prices for quarterbacks at the top of the portal reached the three-to-four million dollar range this cycle, with reports around the most sought-after targets climbing higher still. Those are reported figures rather than audited contracts, so treat them as the market's mood music. Here is what the movement looks like once the money is stripped out and only prior production remains.
Ranked by expected points added per play in their previous season, minimum 200 plays, the incoming transfer quarterbacks run: Colton Joseph to Wisconsin from Old Dominion (0.410), Byrum Brown to Auburn from South Florida (0.409), Josh Hoover to Indiana from TCU (0.381), Drew Mestemaker to Oklahoma State from North Texas (0.366), Anthony Colandrea to Nebraska from UNLV (0.353), Darian Mensah to Miami from Duke (0.343), Rocco Becht to Penn State from Iowa State (0.263) and Beau Pribula to Virginia from Missouri (0.263).
Two names carry real weight. Darian Mensah goes to Miami having thrown for 3,973 yards and 34 touchdowns against six interceptions while taking Duke to an ACC title — the most decorated arm to change addresses, even if the model reads him as roughly a wash against what Miami already had. And Byrum Brown follows his head coach Alex Golesh from South Florida to Auburn, which the model likes considerably: a plus 0.211 upgrade on the man he replaces, the second-largest on the board.
The quietest interesting one is at the top. Colton Joseph arrives at Wisconsin from Old Dominion as the largest projected quarterback upgrade in our transfer sample — and the conventional numbers back it up rather than merely echoing it. Joseph threw for 2,624 yards and 21 touchdowns and also ran for 1,007 yards and 13 more, taking Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Year. That dual threat is why his EPA advantage is more than a passing-stat curiosity. Wisconsin opens against Notre Dame at Lambeau Field.
One note on provenance: expected points added per play, and the comparisons against the starter each transfer replaces, are calculated from Oddsnyper's own database. They are our numbers, not figures published by ESPN, PFF or CFBD.
The Heisman market opens without a favourite worth the name. CJ Carr and Arch Manning are level at +750, and the field behind them is compressed enough that a single September afternoon will reorder it. Quarterbacks dominate, as they always do: Ohio State receiver Jeremiah Smith is the only non-quarterback anywhere near the top of the board.
The board at BetMGM on 6-7 August, set against our offensive rating for each player's team: CJ Carr of Notre Dame at +750 (offence ranked 3rd), Arch Manning of Texas at +750 (7th), Trinidad Chambliss of Ole Miss at +900 (11th), Dante Moore of Oregon at +1000 (1st), Julian Sayin of Ohio State at +1100 (2nd), Darian Mensah of Miami at +1100 (12th), Josh Hoover of Indiana at +1200 (9th) and Jeremiah Smith of Ohio State at +1200 (2nd). Heisman prices move faster than anything else here, so treat those as a snapshot.
Read those two columns together and something falls out. The two quarterbacks with the best-rated offences in the country in front of them — Dante Moore at Oregon and Julian Sayin at Ohio State — are fourth and fifth in the betting. Moore returned to Eugene rather than enter the draft after a 3,565-yard, 30-touchdown season at a 71.8 percent completion rate, and he will play behind the number-one offence by our ratings. The market has him at 10-1.
That is not a claim that the market is wrong. Heisman voting rewards narrative and availability as much as production, and Carr and Manning start with more of both. But if the award follows the football, the two names to hold are the ones the ratings favour rather than the ones the storylines do.
Trinidad Chambliss is the romantic pick and the hardest to price. He arrived at Ole Miss from Division II, won the job in week three, threw for 3,937 yards with three interceptions, finished eighth in the voting, and then won a legal fight for a sixth year of eligibility. He returns to an offence rated eleventh — and to a new head coach who spent last season running the defence.
And then there is Josh Hoover at +1200, which is where this preview began. The betting market prices Indiana's new quarterback as a live Heisman contender. Our model has him as a small downgrade on the man he replaced. Both can be true — Mendoza set an impossible bar, and Hoover inherits the defending champion's supporting cast — but it is a clean illustration of the gap between a story and a number, and this season will settle which one was closer.
The model's opening-weekend numbers sit almost on top of the betting market, which is the correct place for them to sit. Across the 48 week-one games carrying a line, the average gap between our projection and the market is 0.67 points. These are the widest of them, with market lines captured on 9 August at 13:00 UTC — they will move.
Ball State at Ohio State: we make it 53.1, the market 49.5. Wisconsin at Notre Dame: 21.7 against 20.5. SMU at Florida State: we have Florida State getting 1.3 where the market gives them 2.5. UCLA at California: we have California getting 0.3, the market 1.5. Tulane at Duke: 9.4 against 8.5. Louisville at Ole Miss: 5.7 against 6.5, the one line where we are shorter than the market on the favourite.
The Notre Dame line is worth a footnote, because it is the one people will query. That game is at Lambeau Field, and the model treats it as a neutral site: no home-field advantage is applied to either team. The gap there is a genuine disagreement, not an artefact of crediting Notre Dame with a home crowd it will not have.
Note how small those are. The largest disagreement on the entire board is three and a half points, on a fifty-point favourite — which is the range where any rating system is least trustworthy, and where a three-point gap is closer to noise than to information. Everything else sits inside a point and a half. A model that agrees with the market this closely is not finding edges; it is demonstrating that it has been calibrated honestly, which is the necessary first step before anyone should care what it thinks.