The five biggest disasters of this college football season

College football’s regular season is halfway-ish finished, with 136 of the 138 FBS teams having played five or six games. The top of the sport still feels difficult to sort out: Georgia is the clear No. 1, and eight other unbeaten teams follow them. Texas, Ohio State, and Alabama are among the one-loss teams that look like legit title contenders. But it’ll take many more weeks to get a detailed picture at the top.

We need not reserve judgment, however, for some of the season’s biggest catastrophes. The halfway mark is a good time to take stock of teams that have already ensured wasted 2026 seasons. In that spirit, here’s my ranking of the worst disasters of the first half of the year. What makes a disaster? Not just being bad, but being wasteful. This is a list of missed opportunities.

1. Texas A&M

Roster budget range: $45–50 million

Record: 3-3

The stereotype of Aggie football is that this program spends a lot and gets a little. No season has ever lived up to the billing as succinctly as this one. The problem is not just that A&M is already well out of the playoff chase. It’s that the program appears to have declined in every way after winning its first 11 games last year. Quarterback Marcel Reed has dipped from 8.4 to 5.8 yards per pass and has thrown as many interceptions (six) as touchdowns as he cruises toward a career high in sacks taken. The defense has not found a replacement for last year’s standout edge rusher, Cashius Howell, who went to the NFL and left an 11.5-sack hole that nobody is close to filling. (The Aggies have one player with more than one sack. He has two.) Mike Elko is openly feuding with a specific fan message board, and in two months, he’s likely to be sitting on an 0-3 record against Texas since that rivalry restarted in 2024. Not very good ROI.

2. Penn State

Roster budget range: $29–32 million

Record: 3-3

The Nittany Lions have lost three in a row, but their problems started last fall and winter, when AD Pat Kraft took 54 days to find a new coach after firing James Franklin. After not getting at least one coach he wanted (BYU’s Kalani Sitake) and probably a few more, the administrator landed on Matt Campbell. Is Campbell a good football coach who transformed Iowa State? Certainly, but Penn State took so long to hire him that it missed National Signing Day and gave the program a short runway until the January transfer portal window, during which Campbell also had to assemble a staff. The result was a lacking class of new players that amounted to an import of Campbell’s Iowa State nucleus with some bells and whistles around it. That talent deficiency has shown up in a big way, most notably behind center, where QB Rocco Becht has been one of the worst players in the power conferences. Year 2 will tell the story here, but Year 1 is a waste because Penn State will rarely have a more gettable Big Ten schedule than it did this season. There’s no Ohio State, no Indiana, no Oregon, and still nothing good to report.

3. Louisville

Roster budget range: $22–25 million

Record: 3-3

Louisville has one of the most talented rosters in the ACC. The Cardinals had every chance to be the team that faced Miami in the conference championship game. But they’ve already nearly ruled that out with three early losses, two of them in league play. The kicker is that none of these losses needed to happen. In Week 1 against Ole Miss, a series of penalties helped to hand the game to the Rebels, including one that gave Ole Miss a second shot at the decisive missed field goal. In Week 4 against Wake Forest, more penalties (including a series of 15-yard personal fouls) doomed them to another three-point loss. In Week 5, they lost by a field goal once more, this time to an NC State program that is circling the drain. Turnovers doomed them in that one, on a day when Louisville won the yards per play fight, 8.8 yards to 5.9, but fumbled five times and lost three of them. A sad waste of a season.

4. Tulane

Roster budget range: Group of 6

Record: 2-3

From 2022 through 2025, four FBS teams won more games than the Green Wave: Georgia, Ohio State, Oregon, and Michigan. The Wave successfully managed it when they lost head coach Willie Fritz to Houston, replacing him with Jon Sumrall, who led them to the playoff last year as he was leaving to take over at Florida. To replace him, Tulane settled on Will Hall, who had gone 14-30 as the head coach at a far inferior program, Southern Miss, from 2021 to 2024. Hall’s selling point was that he had been a key assistant under Fritz and was on staff again under Sumrall last year, when the Wave won the American and made the playoff. Fair enough, but it had better work, and it’s not working. The Wave are 2-3 after a loss at Army. They’re scoring 18.4 points per game and have not found a quarterback yet. There’s no reason this team could not have contended for the American and the Group of 6 playoff berth.

5. Washington

Roster budget range: $21–25 million

Record: 3-3

Last winter, Husky QB Demond Williams tried to throw aside his contract and hop into the transfer portal. The school gently reminded him that he had a contract and would not be let off so easily. Williams then returned to the program. You can sort of see—in addition to a potential payday—why he might have wanted to leave. Washington’s offensive line is really bad for a second year in a row, and the defense hit a new low in allowing 41 points to Iowa in a loss on Friday night. The embarrassment wasn’t the high point total as much as UW’s leaky back-end coverages and whatever you’d call this display of tackling:

Washington was in the national championship game not even three years ago. Now it looks like a solidly lower-half Big Ten team. Are these guys well suited to the Big Ten? We can’t even pin the Iowa debacle on money, given that the Hawkeyes are spending near the bottom of the conference.