Legal wrangling, employment status, transfer windows: The 2025 college football season kicks off in a little more than two months, and all the buzz is focused anywhere but on the gridiron.

The 2025 college football season kicks off in a little more than two months, and all the buzz is focused anywhere but the gridiron.

Certainly, the decision rendered in House v. NCAA deserves the spotlight. Universities now having the option to designate athletes as employees drastically changes the dynamic of all college sports — or it will, eventually.

A Title IX lawsuit filed just days after the House decision promises to be the first in a lengthy series of courtroom tussles to unfold in the wake of this unprecedented move. In the meantime, yes, contests officiated by whistles and penalty flags — not gavels — will continue.

Before the sport undergoes its next dramatic shift, the 2025 season looms with a different kind of uncertainty: the exciting kind that comes from an unpredictable and thrilling series of fall Saturdays.

For those in need of a break from judicial drama, the following subplots promise to shape a season of the unknown.

Will an Outsider Wrestle Away the National Championship?

For all intents and purposes, the Big Ten and SEC have successfully divided the FBS into three sub-subdivisions: the Group of Five, the Power Two, and something of a power-conference purgatory. The ACC and Big 12 remain “power conferences” insofar as their champions receive automatic Playoff bids, but they’ve clearly been shuffled into a category separate from their former upper-echelon counterparts.

January 2019 marked the last time a program outside the Big Ten or SEC claimed college football’s national championship. That reality fuels the ongoing push by those two conferences to consolidate more Playoff power, now controlling two-thirds of the guaranteed postseason bids.

Contenders from the ACC and Big 12 need to strike while the opportunity still exists. A clear championship challenger emerging from the Big 12 would be one of the bigger surprises of the 2025 season. Last year’s unlikely champion, Arizona State, must replace key contributors, and no other team stands out as a frontrunner.

In the ACC, however, two national title hopefuls warrant attention. First and most obvious is Clemson, last season’s automatic Playoff entrant and the only program outside the Big Ten or SEC to win a title in the post-BCS era.

More intriguing, however, is Pitt. The Panthers haven’t won a national championship since 1976 but have edged toward the periphery of Playoff contention in recent years. They were on the brink in 2024 before a late-season collapse.

Despite that fall, Pitt’s wealth of experience on both sides of the ball sets it apart in an era when roster continuity is rare. Boasting arguably the best defensive player in the nation — linebacker Kyle Louis — the Panthers have the star power to turn heads in 2025 and perhaps shake up the Playoff picture.

A Wide-Open Heisman Race

Hype factors prominently into any Heisman Trophy chase, and few players in recent memory garnered as much as 2024 winner Travis Hunter. Hunter and former Colorado teammate Shedeur Sanders consumed so much oxygen in the college football ecosystem over the last two years, there was little left for other stars.

To that end, no one heads into the 2025 campaign with a comparable spotlight. Texas quarterback Arch Manning may be the closest comparison, but the buzz around him remains speculative until he takes his first snap.

Jeremiah Smith’s monster postseason for Ohio State might give him a strong start, but he faces a near-unprecedented challenge in trying to win the Heisman as a wide receiver who doesn’t play both ways. Before Hunter’s 2024 win as a receiver and cornerback, Tim Brown and Desmond Howard earned the honor largely thanks to their special teams prowess.

History suggests Smith would need a record-setting season akin to DeVonta Smith’s extraordinary 2020 campaign for Alabama.

After Ashton Jeanty made a compelling case to become the first non–Power Five winner since Ty Detmer in 1991, perhaps the door is cracked a little wider for outsiders. A decade after Keenan Reynolds was denied a deserved invite, voters could right that wrong with Blake Horvath leading a Navy team capable of crashing the Playoff.

Or maybe it’s finally a defensive player’s turn. Could someone like Pitt’s Kyle Louis claim the Heisman?

Put Up or Shut Up

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey’s public complaints have grown louder over the last academic year, from pushing for a March Madness at-large bid monopoly to demanding more Playoff guarantees. Whether that’s a direct response to the SEC missing last season’s national championship game is speculative.

However, when SEC brass and supporters alike boasted of their superiority in the 2010s, it was harder to argue with the conference’s stranglehold on the national title.

Will SEC football be more hardwood or diamond? Florida’s win in the NCAA Tournament this spring briefly vindicated the league’s claim to 14 bids, but the 2025 College World Series — featuring more former Pac-12 teams than SEC participants — throws some cold water on the baseball bravado.

All of this is to say that SEC football should feel more pressure than usual to produce a national champion — or at least send a team to the title game — after a two-year drought.