College Football Stock Watch: Why Penn State is on the rise and Alabama isn’t

Think back to this time a year ago.

Penn State entered the 2025 season as a top-10 team and a trendy national title pick. By the second week of November, the Nittany Lions were 3-6, their head coach had been fired and a season full of promise had unraveled during a six-game losing streak.

It’s a reminder of how quickly fortunes can change in college football. The teams that generate offseason buzz don’t always deliver.

Which brings us to 2026, where Penn State now leads the list of teams whose stock is rising heading into the season.

FOX Sports’ lead college football analyst Joel Klatt revealed his latest “stock up” and “stock down” teams during a recent episode of “The Joel Klatt Show.”

Blot: Matt Campbell is now the new head coach at Penn State. This program was 7-6 last season and I think it is clearly on the rise. James Franklin had a very specific problem: losing big games. Once they lost that Oregon game, the season spiraled out of control.

Campbell is a perfect fit for Penn State. His 10 seasons at Iowa State should tell us one thing: this team will be solid.

In this era, you’re going to have years where you just hit the schedule lottery, and Penn State faces what I would say is a soft Big Ten schedule. They brought in a ton of guys from Iowa State, including QB Rocco Becht, whose 39 career starts are the most among returning quarterbacks in college football, and they have a schedule that really has a nine-win bottom.

The toughest games on the schedule are USC at home, Michigan on the road, Washington on the road and then Minnesota at home the week after. This is a schedule they can do some damage with.

They are definitely going to win more than seven games. There is no doubt. I think they could be a 10-2 team contending for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

Blot: Alabama is going to be a good football team, but I don’t know if that will be enough. The Crimson Tide lose their most important player in Ty Simpson, who led them to some of those wins last year. Now you don’t have him. They won 11 games, reached the College Football Playoff and played in the Rose Bowl. They won’t do that again.

Alabama doesn’t have a terribly difficult schedule, at least by SEC standards, but this won’t be as good a team as it was a year ago.

I like Kalen DeBoer. I think he is a great football coach. The one thing he has struggled with throughout his career is finding a reliable running game to complement what has consistently been an elite passing attack. Last year, Alabama couldn’t play football. It’s actually shocking to see Alabama line up and not be able to play football.

They have to fix that, and I don’t know if it’s going to happen. They lost a first-round offensive tackle in Kadyn Proctor. They lost a quarterback in the first round. They lost Germie Bernard. Will they be good on defense? I guess that remains to be seen.

It will be a young team. They will be inexperienced, especially at quarterback. In my estimation, experience at the quarterback position is the most important ingredient for any team in the country, and it is very difficult to have top-end success with an inexperienced quarterback.

Blot: Lane Kiffin is a great coach. He has done this before. He took Ole Miss, brought in a ton of transfers, rebuilt the culture and had great success. It’s not like he has to reinvent the wheel.

This is a program that has won national championships. The expectation at LSU is to compete at the top, and they haven’t. They went 7-6 and fired their head coach. Now you look at the talent they’ve brought in — including QB Sam Leavitt — and ask yourself: Is this really a seven-win team?

The answer is no. Absolutely not. I think this team is going to compete for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

LSU has no top-10 finishes since winning the national championship in 2019. That’s crazy. This is too good a program to be stuck in that kind of stretch, and I think that will change with Kiffin and all the talent that has been added to the roster.

Blot: I love Trinidad Chambliss. I love Kewan Lacy. But Ole Miss went 13-2 and reached the College Football Playoff semifinals a year ago.

Pete Golding has said himself that he would never be a head coach. Now he’s been thrust into that position because there really wasn’t another move for Ole Miss to make. He did a good job, but the bar is simply too high.

The rebels will take a step back. I hope I’m wrong, but remember this: Before Lane Kiffin arrived, Ole Miss had just two 10-win seasons dating back to 1975. Then Kiffin came in and completely changed the trajectory of the program.

You can’t just expect the level of success to continue right away. For decades, this was largely a .500 program. I think they are taking a step back from a 13-2 season and a College Football Playoff semifinal.

Blot: The Bruins were 3-9 a year ago. They fired DeShaun Foster right before that game against Penn State, but it’s the hiring they’ve done that has me excited about this program moving forward. Bob Chesney is a really good football coach.

UCLA is set to bring back QB Nico Iamaleava, and they’ve added more than 40 incoming transfers. So they have experience at quarterback and a significant infusion of talent across the roster. And Chesney brings seven coaches from James Madison with him, including his offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator and special teams coach.

That should sound familiar — that’s exactly what Curt Cignetti did when he left James Madison for Indiana. To me it feels like Indiana-light.

You could see a big jump for UCLA. It’s tough in the Big Ten, but they have experience and talent at the quarterback position and a real coaching staff that can go out there and recruit talent. There is a lot of energy in Westwood and they are recruiting at a high level.

Blot: I believe in the foundation of this program, but Illinois has won 19 games over the last two seasons. That’s real sustained success for a program that didn’t have much of that before Bret Bielema arrived.

Looking at their offense, Luke Altmyer was a big part of their success. Their offensive line was a big part of that as well. Now they’re replacing four starters up front, they have to replace their best wide receiver in Hank Beatty, and they also lost their defensive coordinator to Notre Dame.

Not all programs can be good every single year. We see that with Georgia and Ohio State. Maybe we’ll see that with programs like Miami or Oregon. Those teams have the resources to recruit and get talent out of the transfer portal, but at a program like Illinois, I don’t think they have the resources to do that.

For Illinois, I think there will be a dip. Then they get experience, get veterans, fill in the gaps and be really good in a few years. You’re going to have those dips before you can have the type of success that they had, especially after a two-year 19-game winning streak.

Blot: It’s easy to go up from 4-8. Florida has only had one winning season in the last five years. The Gators should be better than that, but they haven’t been.

Now Jon Sumrall enters. He has a 43-12 record as a head coach and has consistently won wherever he has been. This is a guy who knows how to coach. He has brought in a lot of talent and this is a program that should be able to recruit and retain talent at a high enough level to compete as a strong SEC program.

I’m buying Florida. It might not be a playoff push right away, but I’m definitely buying improvement from a 4-8 season a year ago after they fired Billy Napier as their head coach.

Blot: Last year, Vanderbilt set a program record with 10 wins. Now they have to replace the entire engine of that team in Heisman finalist Diego Pavia.

I know they brought in some elite level talent, especially at quarterback, but it’s inexperienced talent. Pavia had a ton of starts under his belt and was a guy who knew how to play well in big moments. Do we really expect them to suddenly win 10 games again? It was a program record.

I like Clark Lea, but much like Illinois, this is a program that will take a step back to move forward in the years to come. I am selling Vanderbilt this year.

Blot: Say what you will about James Franklin and what he did in big games at Penn State, but the truth is the guy can coach. He raised the bar at Penn State and I think he will raise the bar at Virginia Tech.

Virginia Tech had four straight seasons without being ranked at any point. That program should be better than that.

Franklin retained Brent Pry, who is now the defensive coordinator. When Pry was the defensive coordinator at Penn State, it was a marriage that really worked. They had one of the better defenses in the conference – and really in the country. So he’s back in a role where I think he can excel.

They have 27 incoming transfers, including 12 from Penn State. It will raise the talent level and the ACC is not a very difficult conference. This is a team that I think, at some point this season, can be ranked and maybe even make a push for the ACC Championship.

Blot: I like Georgia Tech, but the Yellow Jackets are coming off a couple of really strong seasons. Haynes King was the engine behind that success, as was Diego Pavia at Vanderbilt.

They won nine games last year — their most since 2016 — but now they must replace King and both coordinators. Losing that kind of continuity and experience is usually the recipe for a step back.

Georgia Tech also has 11 games against Power 4 opponents this year, including non-conference games against Tennessee and Georgia. It’s not an easy schedule. This is not a team that is going to win nine games again.

I think they will take a step back this season before rebuilding in the future.