Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about.

It's almost fall! School is back in session and football is just about back. The 2026 college football season will be here next week, and the sport is as chaotic as ever. NIL money is flying, coaches are forever off their rockers, and the NCAA is holding on for dear life to a system that is crumbling in real time. The offseason has provided its own drama, in between transfer portal chicanery and recruiting violations. In the run-up to Week 0, we wanted to go over some of our favorite stories of the offseason, as a sort of pre-preview of things to know about and keep an eye on ahead of the upcoming season.

Lane Kiffin Watch

Hey, so Lane Kiffin has been in the news. Weird, right? He’s trying to clean up the mess he made when he exited Ole Miss in the midst of a playoff run to take the LSU job in the only way Kiffin knows how: by making things considerably worse. Pretty much every interview he’s done since the switch has only gotten people even madder at him, going from insinuating that racism plagued his efforts to recruit at Ole Miss (not untrue but disingenuous), to getting pissy about what he sees as ungrateful Ole Miss fans who have the temerity to still be angry at him for abandoning them at the worst possible moment.

Kiffin's LSU has one of the most expensive rosters in football, one of the top transfer QBs, and all eyes on him waiting to see if he succeeds or fails. Of particular interest will be measuring up LSU's season this year to Ole Miss's, where, on one hand, the Rebs brought back most of their potent offense from last year, but on the other once again made the classic mistake of hiring their coach based on emotional feelings around an interim stint. I don’t know if Kiffin will succeed, I do know everyone will be captivated by whatever happens. — Israel

First Coach Fired

There aren't likely to be as many in-season firings as there were a year ago, these things running in cycles and all, but it is at least conceivable that Belichick might announce an end-of-year retirement if the Heels don't show serious growth. He won't be the first, though. That will be the lucky duck/poor bastard who wins the "Akron offensive coordinator of the game" drawing to call an as-yet-undetermined number of plays in the Zips' home opener against Robert Morris. In pimping the contest, the Akron AD called it "our biggest night of the season," which tells you a lot of what you need to know about Akron's aspirations. In addition, it feels like the system was gamed out of the box with the finalists including a Barstool host and a prolific YouTube/TikTok contributor, so this might end up just being one more rigged election in a nation increasingly at war with the will of the people. On the other hand, if you're metaphor-hunting for the season at large, this is as good as it gets. And because of that, you have to take the Colonials and the points, just as a blow for our rapidly diminishing desire for human decency. — Ray

Alabama On Fraud Alert

Kalen DeBoer is already on the hot seat, which in a vacuum sounds insane. Bama has had two winning seasons, a playoff berth, and multiple drafted players. It is still a juggernaut in college football ,and DeBoer has maintained the infrastructure. Unfortunately for him, this is Alabama: the most unhinged, divorced-from-reality football program in existence. They do not want "good" football teams, and don't even really settle for great ones; all that really counts for them are champions. Coaches get fired for a lot better than DeBoer has given them. Frankly, it was idiotic for him to take this job, particularly right after Nick Saban retired, when DeBoer probably would've been smarter to jump on the lifeboat to Michigan. He will not survive in this job, mainly because survival means championships, and this is not a championship team. — Israel

Arch Mania

It is (presumably) Arch Manning’s final year playing college football, which of course means you should be ready to lock in for a season of ridiculous draft hype. Is he the number 1 pick? Is he even the number 1 QB? Is he overrated? Is he secretly bad? Is he just a nepo baby? Every game, every throw, every moment on the field will be overanalyzed, including by a new legion of NFL people inserting themselves into our world. You will not enjoy any of it, and surely he will not enjoy any of it. Unless he wins the Heisman and the national championship, there will be no matching the hype that has surrounded Arch. The only thing I know for sure is that when the Cleveland Browns draft him it will go terribly.

At least his dad has been enjoying himself this Summer.

— Israel

The Protect College Sports Act

The Protect College Sports Act is still alive, but has been in the concussion tent almost since the day it took the field. Even after finally getting the SEC and Big Ten on board, the bill has struggled to gain support, and may only hasten the end of the current structure entirely. It speaks to the fundamental problem in college football, which is as follows: "We hate the NCAA because of all the rules, even though we don't have to follow any of the rules, but we want everyone else to follow the rules, so bite me." One of the bill's co-sponsors is Texas senator Ted Cruz. Donald Trump gave it a passing endorsement. In other words, it is a long way from being taken as seriously as, say, the NBA salary cap, and not only because of its proximity to Cruz and Trump. It's also because of the sport's essential dichotomy: a national sport desperate to become a regional sport, following as its new business model professional wrestling of 25 years ago.

The SEC and its commissioner, the designated blowhard Greg Sankey, are in what will be an ongoing pissfight with BIg Ten designated gasbag Tony Petitti over who can get the better media contract and therefore more power in the new landscape, which essentially means they agree that the other 104 Division I teams not covered by either conference can fight each other for the six, 10 or 14 spots in the new uberconference that is surely coming. But at least they're also arguing about the number of teams they want to put in the next college football playoff (the Big Ten wants 24, the SEC wants its entire league membership and doesn't much care who else gets in). They're going to succeed only in turning the sport's structure into a new version of the Stans—the five Central Asian countries that broke away from the old Soviet Union and have transitioned into being a Jeopardy Daily Double question. — Ray

Brendan Sorsby Leaves A Mess At Texas Tech

Brendan Sorsby made a complete mess by doing all that sports betting. As a result, the NFL shut down his chances of being drafted and Texas Tech is going into the season with sophomore Will Hammond. Tech did all it could to cover itself in shame as it tried to get Sorsby back on the field, only for him to declare for the draft anyway. So much for all that rehab and therapy that was totally gonna fix him! And so Tech made a fool of itself for nothing, and now they bring back a quality team that is hoping its raw talent can come good. Sorsby’s story isn’t unique. Rather than being a total outlier, it is far more likely that Sorsby goes down as just the first big-name student athlete DQ'd for gambling. It behooves these schools to start thinking about how to combat this stuff now, before it gets even worse. — Israel

The Phil Steele College Football Ripoff

Part of the annual rite of college football is that most old-school of relics, the Phil Steele College Football Preview magazine, a 376-page doorstop that almost every CFB fan over the age of 30 claims as a requirement for aficionado-hood. Only this year, Steele knockoffs were found for sale on Amazon that were at least 100 pages shorter than usual, and included contributors named "Russel Brieveton" and "Gilgert Martwel." There is no good reason to look at the staff writers for a magazine whose type size was modeled on the laundry tags sewn inside sweaters, but Gilgert Martwel? Steele was understandably incensed at the ripoff and eventually Amazon pulled the bogus goods. This tells us that the publishing industry has now found something worse than AI, which we didn't think could be done. But we do know this: When the next round of Defector intern interviews are held next spring, we will give serious consideration to anyone actually named Gilgert Martwel. They just have to bring six forms of legal ID and contact information for their parents, who had better be able to prove that Gilgert Martwel is a well-established family name and not just a series of unfortunate typos delivered by pig stenographers. — Ray

No Aura At Arkansas

Don’t worry about not having aura, coach, not everyone can be Deion Sanders, swaggering their way into a 4-8 record. You’ll deal with a dripless losing record in Arkansas and you’ll like it! Can't wait for the season to start. — Israel