Bill ConnellyJan 6, 2026, 07:00 AM ETCloseBill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.Follow on X
There are lots of ways to end a season disappointed. Expectations can play a role, of course, but they don’t have to. Sometimes a first-year head coach gets off on the wrong foot, and sometimes a well-established coach loses his footing. Sometimes you start out the No. 1 team in the country, and three losses take you down. Sometimes you start out expecting 3-9 and still fall far short.
Be it because they face-planted in a title chase or they just plain stunk, here are the teams most disappointed with how 2025 played out, loosely ranked in eight categories.
Four preseason top-10 teams either finished the season with seven or fewer wins or rallied too late to save themselves. Any list of disappointments probably has to start with that.
1. Clemson. Penn State put too many eggs in the “Beating Oregon early in the season” basket and collapsed when that didn’t work out. LSU needed a thinned-out offensive line to hold up (and its receivers to not drop a ton of passes), and it didn’t happen. Texas needed Arch Manning to be the best player in the country to paper over some cracks at receiver and on the offensive line; that didn’t happen either.
3. LSU. My SP+ ratings just never caught up to how awful this team was offensively. The Tigers overachieved against offensive projections just once, and it was against an FCS opponent (Southeastern Louisiana). Otherwise it was a cascade of awful performances, injuries, drops and a team that wasted a great defense and got its head coach fired.
4. Texas. Manning never really looked the part of a preseason Heisman favorite (at least not until it was too late), and when he and the offense perked up late in the season, the defense slipped a bit. But if not for a single, awful defeat at Florida in early October, Steve Sarkisian’s Longhorns still could have sneaked into the CFP.
It wasn’t just top-10 teams falling short of hype. Five more teams began the year ranked between 11th and 17th and, for a variety of reasons, came nowhere close to sniffing the CFP bids they were hoping for.
The bad performances were awful, and the excellent performances — they did nearly beat two playoff teams (Alabama and Texas A&M) — resulted in gut-wrenching losses. But hey, next season is even-numbered again! Pencil the Gamecocks in for nine wins!
6. Florida. Quarterback DJ Lagway’s offseason injuries doomed the Gators from the start, as he began the year looking rusty and only sporadically found a rhythm. A painfully young and frequently shuffled receiving corps didn’t help. The defense wasn’t bad but never dominated. Firing Billy Napier after a 3-4 start wasn’t entirely surprising, but unlike Penn State, the losses only mounted under an interim.
7. Kansas State. Whoever loses in Ireland is evidently doomed. (You’ve been warned, TCU and North Carolina.) Unlike Florida State in 2024 and Nebraska in 2022, Kansas State only briefly collapsed following its loss to Iowa State in Dublin, but by the time the Wildcats found their footing they were 2-4 and just hoping for a .500 finish. They got there, but an exhausted team passed on a bowl bid, and coach Chris Klieman retired.
For three 2024 playoff teams and another that had surged to nine wins, 2025 just never looked like it was supposed to.
9. Boise State. Even without Ashton Jeanty, BSU looked like the Group of 5’s standard-bearer heading into 2025, but known stars such as pass rusher Jayden Virgin-Morgan and quarterback Maddux Madsen didn’t take a step forward (Madsen was average, then hurt), the new RBs fumbled way too much, and against three SP+ top-40 opponents they lost by a combined 100-24. The Broncos rallied to win a competitive Mountain West, but falling from the CFP to outside the SP+ top 60 wasn’t the vision for 2025.
10. Tennessee. It could have been worse — Tennessee still went 8-5 — but if you had told Volunteers fans that their offense would surge after losing Nico Iamaleava, they would have probably guessed a major playoff run was in the works. Instead, the defense disintegrated, and the Vols went 0-5 against teams that finished with winning records.
11. SMU. Again, it could have been worse — SMU won nine games after a 2-2 start. But the offense didn’t really figure things out until midseason, and the Mustangs failed to defend their ACC crown. Of course, they also lost three games by a total of seven points. With just a couple of bounces, they’d have been right back in the playoff mix.
You didn’t have to be ranked in the preseason to have your hopes shattered in 2025. The six teams below were projected, on average, to win a combined 41.5 games, per SP+. They won 22.
14. Virginia Tech. The Hokies were the Wisconsin of the ACC: Living up to their No. 42 preseason projection was going to require a ton of new players (and two new coordinators) clicking. They did not. Brent Pry was fired three games in after the Hokies allowed 89 combined points to Vanderbilt and Old Dominion. They were competitive for a bit, but lost their last four games by an average of 31-14 and finished outside the SP+ top 100 for the first time since 1978.
15. North Carolina. My go-to line in the offseason was that, while it was hard to figure out what Bill Belichick might be capable of in college football, the roster he had compiled positively screamed “6-6” to me. I was incorrect: It screamed 4-8. The defense figured some things out for a while, but the offense stunk out loud, and the “We consider ourselves the 33rd NFL team” line from general manager Michael Lombardi last winter turned into one of the most easily mockable quotes of 2025.
16. Auburn. When you have a terrible record in close games one year, you evidently aren’t guaranteed improvement the next. Auburn suffered a losing record despite a plus-77 scoring margin in 2024, a difficult combination that requires a ton of gut-wrenching defeats. And in 2025 … the Tigers suffered a losing record despite a plus-73 scoring margin. They were 0-6 in one-score finishes, and Hugh Freeze was shown the door.
A lower-expectations version of the last category. These five teams combined for just 21 wins and an average SP+ ranking of 93.2 in 2024; most took on a bunch of new transfers in the hopes of lighting a fire. Instead, we got total implosion: 11 combined wins, an average ranking of 112.2 and four fired head coaches. When things fall apart in this new, transfer-heavy era, they can really fall apart.
18. Georgia State. Losing 73 transfers over a two-year period evidently left GSU with only a couple of stellar players on offense and virtually none on defense. The Panthers beat only Murray State this fall and only once allowed fewer than 27 points to an FBS opponent (and it was against James Madison, of all teams). Shawn Elliott left with awkward timing in February 2024, and Dell McGee has been unsuccessfully swimming against the tide ever since.
20. Michigan State. Jonathan Smith didn’t really generate traction at Oregon State until his fourth season; he didn’t get even a third season in East Lansing. He inherited a Spartans team that had gone 9-15 in its previous two seasons and ranked 88th in SP+ before his arrival; his two State teams went 9-15 with rankings of 90th and 83rd. I didn’t like the Pat Fitzgerald hire, but the bar for showing improvement is ridiculously low.
21. Oregon State. Oregon State went 1-11 and ranked 120th at the end of the Gary Andersen era in 2017, and it took Jonathan Smith a while to rebuild. Within two years of Smith’s departure, the Beavers fell right back to 2-10 and 124th. Recent conference realignment trends were cruel to OSU, and Trent Bray had no chance. Will JaMarcus Shephard fare better?
22. Florida State. On paper, improving from 2-10 and 83rd in SP+ to 5-7 and 41st is solid work. But when you’re Florida State, you’re still only two years removed from a 19-game winning streak, and you begin 2025 by pounding a soon-to-be playoff team (Alabama), this was improvement in name only. The Noles started 3-0 and rose as high as seventh in the AP poll, but a run of tight losses threw them off course, and their road form (0-5) was so awful that they even lost to Stanford.
23. Maryland. Maryland fans are used to watching early promise dissipate, but the Terrapins are turning it into performance art. In Mike Locksley’s seven seasons in College Park, he’s 21-5 in September and 15-39 thereafter, and the Terps pulled off a perfect 4-0 and 0-8 combination this fall. Holding on to blue-chip freshman quarterback Malik Washington for another season brings hope, but hope tends to produce only one thing for Maryland.
24. Kansas. Granted, even sniffing bowl eligibility is still a pretty new thing for Kansas after the epic futility of the 2010s. But after falling to 5-7 with a 1-5 record in one-score games in 2024, Lance Leipold’s Jayhawks looked poised to rebound this fall and started 3-1. But thanks in part to another couple of tight losses, they again stumbled to 5-7.
These four teams went a combined 33-19 in 2024, each either improving significantly over 2023 or, in Northern Illinois’ case, improving a little and beating Notre Dame. A sign of great things to come? Not so much. They went 10-38 in 2025.
25. Syracuse. The Orange were on their way to 3-1 when quarterback Steve Angeli was lost for the season because of injury. No other QB on the roster was even remotely ready, and they averaged 11 points per game the rest of the way. Backup Rickie Collins performed so poorly that head coach Fran Brown gave three desperation starts to freshman lacrosse player Joseph Filardi. Maybe Angeli’s return cures what ailed the Orange, but a collapse of this magnitude hints at massive structural problems.
26. Boston College. BC was a salty 7-6 in Bill O’Brien’s first season, but 2025 was a disaster. The defense gave up at least 36 points seven times, and the offense scored 13 or fewer four times, and while the Eagles improved late in the season, that basically meant more competitive losses. With 22 players already in the portal, it’s looking like a pretty hard reset heading into 2026.