College football's biggest 2025 stories, plus a loaded Playoff quarterfinal
Until Saturday is The Athletic's free college football newsletter.
Until Saturday Newsletter 🏈 | This is The Athletic’s college football newsletter. Sign up here to receive Until Saturday directly in your inbox.
Hey, thank you for being part of this newsletter in 2025. Let’s review some of the most important college football things you saw in your inbox along the way.
School Year: CFB’s 2025, as told by most-clicked stories
Month by month, here were this year’s dozen-ish links that were the most-read by Until Saturday’s dashing and intuitive subscribers. This timeline happens to serve as a pretty good retrospective of what happened in college football during the last 365-ish days:
Most-read newsletter link in January: Days after declaring for the NFL Draft, injured Georgia quarterback Carson Beck instead entered the transfer portal. The cycle’s most prominent transfer, he’d sign a multimillion-dollar deal at Miami to replace No. 1 pick Cam Ward. He ranks 10th this season in passer rating against FBS opponents, though he’s thrown double-digit picks for the second year in a row. Big quarterfinal tomorrow night. More on those below.
- Also, one of the biggest clickers of the year in The Pulse, our 4.4 million-subscriber all-sports newsletter (subscribe!), was Stewart Mandel’s recap of last season’s Playoff quarterfinal, opening with Notre Dame taking down Georgia.
February: Chris Vannini’s final 134-team ranking of the 2024 season, led by national champ Ohio State. Last season’s biggest riser: Big 12 champ Arizona State, from preseason No. 89 to final No. 9, all but swapping spots with that 2-10 Florida State team.
March: Stewart Mandel’s early 2025 rankings, including the version updated amid roster maneuvering. Other than Notre Dame, the top five did not end up faring well, but No. 10 BYU was a hit that the preseason AP Top 25 wouldn’t really pick up on until October.
- Also among Until Saturday’s 10 most-clicked stories this year: Stanford fired head coach Troy Taylor in March, with GM Andrew Luck’s name on the statement. Busy carousel underway early.
April: Matt Baker and Austin Meek did some science, trying to calculate which college football team has the most fans. Almost all of the top 10 — from Michigan to Texas A&M — generated drama all season, for better or worse.
- Also from April: Katie Strang’s story on Pat McAfee’s baseless amplification of internet gossip about an 18-year-old Ole Miss student.
May: Every five-star QB of the internet’s recruit-ratings era, ranked by Antonio Morales. Come for Tim Tebow vs. Vince Young, but stay for lots of guys to remember, including eventual Atlanta Braves third-base coach Matt Tuiasosopo.
June: How did former NFL players who lost a lot of games to Bill Belichick feel about his soap-opera summer? “Everybody rediscovers themselves,” chuckled Jairus Byrd (Oregon), a three-time Pro Bowl safety (Bills).
July: All 136 projected FBS starting QBs, ranked by Sam Khan Jr. and Antonio, based on surveying 40-plus coaches and staffers. Tiers 2 (Diego Pavia, Hanyes King, etc.) and 3 (Fernando Mendoza, Dante Moore, etc.) turned out stacked. Biggest riser: FBS yardage leader Drew Mestemaker, then North Texas’ projected backup behind No. 115 Reese Poffenbarger.
- July is for assembling spreadsheets. Every Power 4 football program, ranked by estimated financial value, from Texas through Wake Forest and company.
August: Remember when Week 1 ranked as the biggest opening weekend ever? Texas-Ohio State mostly held up, but LSU-Clemson turned out to be hot air. Notre Dame-Miami was ultimately the regular season’s most consequential game, fodder for a still-ongoing committee storyline. Alabama-Florida State seemed important once FSU won, but the committee would decide 31-17 Bama losses to 5-7 teams are NBD.
September: Lots of you clicked this throwback link to David Ubben’s 2022 retrospective on Bobby Petrino’s most spectacular scandal. Petrino’s 2025 comeback as the Razorbacks’ interim would be both pretty impressive (the Hogs nearly beat Tennessee, Texas A&M and LSU) and a big dud (0-7, contributing to one of the best 2-10 teams ever, which deserves a banner). He is now apparently joining Belichick’s staff, ensuring UNC’s second consecutive soap-opera summer.
October: It’s quaint to look back at the morning of Brian Kelly’s final day as LSU coach, after a loss to A&M, and ponder how much Baton Rouge drama was yet to come. The Kelly postmortem! The governor thing! The AD thing! The Kiffin thing! The governor is now an … envoy to Greenland?
- James Franklin’s Penn State downfall was one of the year’s biggest stories, but this newsletter’s cadence (Sunday mornings, Tuesday afternoons, Thursday afternoons) meant lots of you already knew about it by the time we got back in touch. Here’s Bruce Feldman and Ralph Russo on what went wrong, though.
- Also big in The Pulse: this ranking of FBS’ 25 best stadiums, topped by LSU’s. I’m not sure who cast the only vote for Northwestern’s.
November: Indiana receiver Omar Cooper’s catch to beat Penn State remains the best play of the year. We debated whether it was the best catch in college football history, and Gus Johnson’s immediate, larynx-straining proclamation that it won Fernando Mendoza the Heisman turned out pretty solid.
December: Notre Dame’s Heisman finalist, Jeremiyah Love, on why his team missed the Playoff: “We were only in that position because we put ourselves in that position.” Responsible and reasonable, though it will remain true that the Irish should’ve been in. (And also true that they probably should’ve agreed to play BYU.)
- As with the Franklin story at Penn State, Sherrone Moore’s firing on a Wednesday meant most of you didn’t find out about it via this newsletter. Guess I’ll link again to this look inside his very weird tenure at Michigan.
Quick Snaps
💸 Looking for a new way to lose money on disinformation? You’re in luck! That’s what prediction markets are for.
😖 If Notre Dame and USC keep squabbling over their football series’ hiatus, they might get so mad at each other they have to take it out by playing football. The latest: Lincoln Riley accused the Irish of bailing too quickly on negotiations, though it sounds to me like USC’s neutral-site idea was wildly off the mark. A busy holiday week for both:
- Despite serious NFL interest, Marcus Freeman is staying put with a reworked contract.
- Matt Campbell’s Penn State is hiring Trojans defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn, a former Nittany Lions DB. He significantly improved UCLA and USC defenses in back-to-back seasons.
〽️ Kinda got used to putting the Michigan emoji next to really lip-curling items. Change of pace! Kyle Whittingham says the new offense will “suit (Bryce Underwood) to a T.'”
- From the yay (Curt Cignetti, Steve Spurrier, Bill Snyder 2.0) to the ugh (Les Miles at Kansas, Bill Belichick so far) and everything in between (Mack Brown 2.0): Here’s a modern history of old guys being hired to new head-coaching gigs. Whittingham is a sturdy 66.
📰 Other news:
-
Most random-sounding connection of the cycle: Northwestern OC Chip Kelly, most recently of the Las Vegas Raiders.
-
After losing the Flop Bowl on Saturday against Penn State, Dabo Swinney fired 2022 Broyles Award-winning OC Garrett Riley and 10-year safeties coach Mickey Conn.
-
New top wide receiver on the portal board: rising junior Cam Coleman of Auburn. 2024’s third-highest-rated recruit. Portal opens Friday.
🌀 Speaking of: Expect a very busy Day 1 of the new portal window, “like NBA free agency.” That and more in our portal primer, including Texas Tech being favored to land No. 1 transfer Brendan Sorsby (unless the former Cincinnati QB turns pro) and the schools hit hardest by transfers so far: Iowa State, likely to Penn State’s benefit, along with teams like the notoriously transient Florida State.
Holy Days: Loaded quarterfinals highlight New Year’s
Last season at this time, two of the four Playoff quarterfinals had double-digit point spreads (Texas-Arizona State and Boise State-Penn State, though the former turned into arguably the best CFP game ever).
This time, all four are within single digits. Depending on when you look, at least, because Ohio State’s currently favored by 9.5 over Miami at BetMGM. Point is: Everything feels up for grabs.
Tomorrow’s opening quarterfinal (viewing info on the calendar below):
No. 2 Ohio State vs. No. 10 Miami, Cotton Bowl:
- Look back 23 years ago, at one of the biggest upsets (and certainly the most controversial ending) in title game history. In this upside-down reunion, the Canes are the discredited underdog against the defending champ.
The other three are on New Year’s Day, when college football’s national championship game would happen, were we in a less fallen world.
No. 4 Texas Tech vs. No. 5 Oregon, Orange Bowl:
- It’s kinda funny, having to describe the Red Raiders in every mention as the big-spendin’ yeehaw team, when they really just joined a tier of even bigger spenders. On a longer timeline, the same goes for the Ducks. Tech’s here because it spent wisely.
No. 1 Indiana vs. No. 9 Alabama, Rose Bowl:
- Surreal Hoosiers item of the week: Bruce Feldman wrote a story full of coaches praising one of the defenses playing in a huge Bama postseason game, and they’re talking about … Indiana’s bunch of three-stars.
No. 3 Georgia vs. No. 6 Ole Miss, Sugar Bowl:
- Anything changed since the Bulldogs beat the Rebels in October? Just a few things, I guess. Ole Miss OC Charlie Weis Jr. is also LSU’s OC now, for one.
Also tomorrow, more bite-size joys from bowl season, the part of the postseason that doesn’t serialize itself into an MCU. Don’t overlook the No. 13 Texas-No. 18 Michigan Citrus Bowl and No. 14 Vanderbilt-No. 23 Iowa “ReliaQuest” (Outback) Bowl, along with the two devils of FBS battling for just the second time in the last thousand years. Lordship of the underworld, on the line in El Paso.
Games today, too, all color-coded by watchability. Just 20 left, so make ’em count:
Overall, I think the results of bowl season are proving your team’s conference is the best and deepest in the country, since whenever it does poorly, there’s a lot of important context that the mainstream media is overlooking. Happy New Year from untilsaturday@theathletic.com!
📫 Love Until Saturday? Check out The Athletic’s other newsletters, too.