Evaluating the early title favorites for 2025
Who does Vegas think are the favorites for the coming season?
There’s good reason to be cautious at this juncture about which college football teams are best poised to win the crown in the 2025-26 season.
The extended playoffs, combined with the fact a lot of players have NIL contracts signed through the spring, means a lot of the top contenders aren’t going to really open up and start firing off shots in the transfer portal until the next window. Of course the extent to which you can add key, winning pieces after spring practices is more limited. You have less time to incorporate those players into the program and schemes.
At infrastructure positions like quarterback or safety? You’d better have a guy on campus as long as possible to learn your system and preferred gameplans. You want these guys around by winter at least, even if they’re true veterans, and not summer. However, at high impact space force positions like wide receiver or defensive tackle? There’s a lot more leeway to make a late addition. The name of the game in the space force is 1-on-1 prowess borne of elite athleticism and skill, not necessarily chemistry and cohesion with teammates.
So with that in mind, the early Vegas odds for next year’s champion are just that, early. I figured we’d go through them though with an eye toward the infrastructure pieces on each team and what would need to happen in terms of developing youngsters or hitting the spring portal.
Here are the early fan duel numbers for the top 10 most likely champions:
Ohio State +500
Texas +650
Oregon +650
Georgia +700
Penn State +850
Notre Dame +1200
Tennessee +1600
Alabama +1800
Clemson +1800
LSU +2000
We’ll go through each after the jump…