My biggest questions for the 2026 fall season

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

This is going to be a big week. I have a few openings on Thursday and Friday for folks who want to chat with me. I’ll find some time to squeeze in more research and reporting around those time slots, plus more updates to Extra Points Library.

That’ll be a little bit easier, I suspect, now that Chicago Public Schools have finally started again, meaning my home office will be slightly quieter now that I don’t need to get up every 20 minutes to chase my children away from watching YouTube shorts on various screens. I swear, even after I unplug the television, hide the Nintendo Switch and lock up all the phones, they’ll find a way to watch YouTube on the family fridge, or something.

While the start of the school year brings a modicum of respite for yours truly, it also means football season is about to begin. Shoot, women’s soccer has been going on for weeks, and women’s volleyball started Friday.

I started my sportswriting career doing more conventional reporting: going to games, writing box scores, interviewing players and living and dying, more or less, by the actual athletic schedule. I still very much care who wins or loses, and there’s plenty that happens on the field that holds my interest, but since my beat has changed and I have to focus on things like jersey patch sponsorships, revenue generation and political appropriations, I can’t look any of you in the eye and pretend I am a ball knower.

So I don’t want to attempt to write a conventional season preview. If you invite me to hop on your regional sports radio program and ask me about, like, Tulsa’s QB situation or how many games Virginia Tech is going to win, I am going to sound very stupid. I’m not the guy you book for that.

But there are several bigger-picture things I’ll be watching this season, beyond how my beloved Buckeyes perform every week.

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Talk to a conference commissioner, athletic director, or most coaches … and they’ll tell you the past few years have been more chaotic than any other time in their career. Constant lawsuits over athlete compensation rules and eligibility make roster construction and planning nearly impossible. Costs, from skyrocketing coach salaries to new athlete payroll commitments, are growing faster than revenues. If you had a dollar for every time a lanyard-wearing administrator said "unsustainable," well, you’d have enough money to buy yourself quite a basketball team.

But here’s the wild thing. Even if all of that stuff is true, and even if many fans will tell you they don’t like the direction college sports is headed, they’re not really showing that with their actions.

Television ratings across college football have been strong, if not record-breaking, over the past few seasons. Ratings in other sports, like college volleyball, keep setting records as well. According to the Extra Points Library, more than 66 percent of public schools in Division I generated more ticket revenue in FY25 than they did in FY24.

Now, I’d be careful about using TV ratings as the only proximity for the health of college sports, especially since the methodology for calculating ratings has changed and broadcasters can fiddle with definitions to get the headlines they want.

Ticket revenue among the absolute powerhouse programs appears to be mostly stable, based on the data I have, but you can find schools from all across D-I — from Power 4 programs like Houston, Colorado and Minnesota to mid-majors like UTSA, Indiana State and Eastern Michigan — where total ticket revenue dropped by at least 13 percent. At Eastern Michigan, it dropped 47 percent from FY24 to FY25 (again, across all sports, not just football).

There’s a saying I’ve heard in higher education circles: Executives typically aren’t all that good at reading, but boy do they know how to count. Will any of the stuff that’s easily counted, from butts in seats to eyeballs on TV to donations given, start to dry up? Or, despite administrative furor, is the economic system of college sports a teensy bit more resiliant than we’re giving it credit for being?

For the vast majority of my career, figuring out who was going to be a threat to win a national title in college football was actually pretty easy. You just looked at who’d signed more blue-chip recruits than three-stars. If you wanted to win a title, you needed a Blue-Chip Ratio higher than 50 percent.

But then Indiana went and blew the entire conventional wisdom framework to smithereens. The Hoosiers won a national title with just seven blue-chip rated recruits. Their 2027 class, while far better on paper than just about any other Indiana football recruiting class ever, isn’t close to hitting that 50 percent BCR rate.

The preseason title favorites, like Ohio State, Oregon, Texas, Georgia and Notre Dame, are all programs that recruit dozens of elite high school prospects a year, and generally build more of their roster via high school than the portal.

But plenty of schools that don’t fit that template could make noise. BYU, Utah, Houston, Virginia Tech, Iowa and Boise State could all threaten for playoff bids or more. Will us football pencil pushers need to update our formulas and create a new framework? Or will Indiana be the exception that proves the rule?

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I don’t mind admitting to being a football simpleton, the kind of man who intellectually understands there is beauty and glory in a 13-3 slugfest but who really would rather watch two teams score in the 40s. Points are fun, in my humble opinion. I enjoy teams scoring points.

But a funny thing is happening in college football. Teams aren’t running nearly as many plays as they used to, and defenses are getting much better. As the Athletic noted, in 2025, points per game in FBS dropped to the lowest mark in 15 years.

If you’re a fan of a powerhouse program like I am, that can make the early non-conference games a true nightmare to sit through. Hell hath no fury like an Ohio State fanbase after the Buckeyes only beat Ball State by 24, after all. The pressure and expectations from fans may no longer meet the schematic reality of how football works.

But beyond angry message board users, I wonder if a decline in offensive plays and offensive counting stats will eventually begin to clash with the contract/transfer portal incentives for players. Will a player be confident he’ll still get market rate in the portal if he’s efficient and effective but only running for 70 yards a game instead of 115? Will it be harder to keep an offensive locker room together if touches go down for everybody? Will television executives care?

Maybe they won’t! Maybe America won’t care either. But I’m still going to check in and read the wailing and gnashing of teeth of fans whose teams just aren’t clobbering opponents by enough, even if they dominate. Who knows? Maybe those margins matter more for the selection committee than we think.

The vast majority of payments from House appear to be going to football players, although we don’t know for certain, since there hasn’t been any mandatory disclosure at scale of revenue-sharing payments, and we won’t get enough of that data until early spring.

But from talking to athletic directors and reading other reporters, I know that at least some schools allocate funds to other sports, like soccer, volleyball, softball, etc. New television deals, private fundraising and league distributions have also altered the traditional financial balance of power across many sports and leagues.

Will we learn anything new from this year’s men’s soccer, women’s soccer and women’s volleyball seasons about how the influx of cash (and new costs) are shaping who is spending on what? Will another team from outside the traditional power structure — like Furman, George Washington, Princeton or Akron — win another men’s soccer title? Could women’s volleyball see another out-of-nowhere national champion, like it did with Texas A&M? Will the strength of those sports further consolidate around the handful of most resourced programs in the Big Ten, SEC and ACC?

Not sure! Whatever roster construction framework for football doesn’t automatically apply to soccer, softball or anything else. But it’s worth following, for sure.

What are you looking for this season?