The Bulldogs are the preseason SEC favorite. The offense has a quarterback question the evaluation community hasn't fully answered. The competition this spring is about as real as spring practice gets.
The University of Georgia opens spring practice Monday with the kind of roster returning most programs spend years trying to build, and with the one evaluation question the program has been carrying since November still in need of an answer. Kirby Smart's Bulldogs return eight starters from a defense that ranked in the top twenty nationally last season. The offensive line, which generated favorable conversation throughout 2025 for its reliability in power running situations, returns its three interior starters. The program is the preseason consensus favorite in the SEC and has finished in the top five of the national rankings in each of the last four seasons.
Manning returns with 22 starts and a new receiver target. The defense has eight starters back. Spring practice is the most honest diagnostic in college football.
The University of Texas opened spring practice this week with Arch Manning taking first-team snaps, beginning what figures to be the most scrutinized spring quarterback evaluation in college football entering 2026. Manning enters his junior season having started 22 games for the Longhorns, producing performances that ranged from among the best in the country to constrained by scheme and circumstance in ways that made evaluation difficult. The evaluation community has not reached consensus on his ceiling, and spring practice is the first opportunity to gather new data in a controlled environment without the noise of a game week.
Bill Connelly's pre-spring rankings identify three prospects whose spring tape will determine whether the projections were earned. The evaluation cycle is the most honest diagnostic in college football.
Spring practice opens across the country over the next three weeks, and the most consequential evaluation cycle for Power 4 programs in 2026 is at quarterback — a position group defined this offseason by transfers, developmental questions, and the long shadow of a class that left in the NFL Draft. Bill Connelly's pre-spring quarterback rankings for all 68 Power 4 programs, published this week at ESPN, identified Arch Manning, CJ Carr, and Julian Sayin as the three prospects attracting the most national attention entering spring. Each arrives in his spring cycle with meaningful production behind him and meaningful questions still unanswered.
The quarterback's development trajectory is the story the offense tells itself. The defense is the organizational identity. Spring will show whether the depth is real.
Oregon opened spring practice this week under Dan Lanning, entering his fifth season with a program that has now won 48 games in four years and is the standard-bearer for what success looks like in the modern Big Ten's western flank. The Ducks lost their most productive offensive player — the receiver who led the team in yards and touchdowns in 2025 — to the NFL Draft, along with two defensive starters who were among the conference's better players at their positions. What they return is a quarterback who entered 2025 as one of the more widely discussed sophomore prospects in the country and ended it as one of the more widely discussed junior prospects in the country: a player whose development trajectory has been consistently upward in a system that Lanning and offensive coordinator Will Stein have built specifically around his skill set.
Carson Beck returns at quarterback. The defense lost four starters to the draft. The portal additions are experienced. Whether they're Georgia-caliber is spring's central question.
Georgia opened spring practice this week under Kirby Smart, entering his eleventh season with a program that has established itself as the SEC's standard of success and is now navigating the particular challenge of sustaining dominance after losing significant NFL talent to the draft. The Bulldogs sent nine players to the NFL Draft following the 2025 season, including four defensive starters who were central to the unit that made Georgia the conference's best defense for the second consecutive year. Replacing that production — not the same players, but the same output — is the task that Smart and defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann are working through this spring.
Sarkisian enters year six with the most experienced quarterback in Austin in years and a defense that needs to show it can hold up against the top half of the SEC.
Texas opened spring practice Monday in Austin under Steve Sarkisian, entering his sixth season with a program that has won consistently in the Big 12 and now faces its second full season in the SEC with an expectation that the step up in competition is fully priced in. The Longhorns finished 10-3 in 2025 in their first SEC season, which was widely read as a reasonable outcome given the difficulty of the schedule and the transition. The internal expectation heading into 2026 is different — the program has recruited at an elite level since Sarkisian's arrival, and the roster depth is now at a point where the 2025 record feels like a floor rather than a ceiling.
Simpson returning, Marchiol added through the portal. The Crimson Tide's spring is about identifying a starter and building the continuity the offense didn't fully have in 2025.
Alabama opens spring practice Wednesday under Kalen DeBoer, who is entering his second spring with a program that, by the standards of the previous era, is still in the early stages of adjustment. The Crimson Tide finished 10-3 in 2025 — a record that would have been considered a success at virtually any other program in the country and was treated as a disappointment in Tuscaloosa. The fan base's expectations were formed over fifteen years of Nick Saban's program. DeBoer's job is not to match that standard immediately but to demonstrate that the trajectory is correct and that the work being done in the building is the kind of work that leads somewhere.
Smart chose continuity over portal volume this offseason. The result is a roster with unusual cohesion. Whether Beck is fully healthy is the spring's central question.
Georgia opened spring practice Monday with the largest returning starter group Kirby Smart has coached since arriving in Athens. The Bulldogs have 16 players back who started at least eight games in 2025, which is an unusual volume of continuity at a program that routinely sends players to the NFL Draft after their junior seasons. That continuity is deliberate. Smart made a decision in the offseason to prioritize retention through the portal and NIL rather than use the spring to integrate a heavy transfer class. The result is a roster that looks like a roster — not a collection of pieces still figuring out how to coexist — and a spring practice schedule that can focus on refinement rather than installation.
Penn State under Schiano, Georgia with its largest returning class in years, LSU in its first spring under Charlie Strong. The evaluation season begins.
Spring practice windows open across the Power 4 in March, and the programs that moved fastest — either in the hiring cycle or in the portal — will enter those eight weeks with a real advantage over organizations still assembling their rosters. The most interesting spring to watch is at Penn State, where James Franklin's abrupt mid-season departure and the hire of Greg Schiano has created genuine uncertainty about what direction the program is heading. Schiano built Rutgers into a competitive program twice, so the pedigree is there. What isn't there yet is any clarity about whether Penn State's returning roster fits what Schiano wants to do. The spring will answer that question, but it will do so publicly, in front of a fan base that is still processing what happened in October.
The recruiting response has exceeded expectations. The scheme installation is a work in progress. Spring will answer the remaining questions.
Bill Belichick is entering his second full offseason at North Carolina, and the program is beginning to show the fingerprints of a coach who spent six decades studying football at its highest level. The first year was, by Belichick's own admission in his postseason press conference, a process year. Installing a defensive system built on concepts that NFL players spend entire careers learning — with 18-to-22-year-olds who have had weeks to absorb it — produces predictable growing pains. The Tar Heels gave up too many big plays in coverage and struggled at times with the physical demands of Belichick's base front. That was expected.
Experience beats potential in the portal era — and the quarterbacks who found the right second home proved it again this season.
The 2025 college football season produced another round of evidence that the transfer portal has fundamentally changed the developmental path for quarterbacks — and that the players who find the right second landing spot are producing at a rate that's hard to ignore. Across the Power conferences in 2025, quarterbacks who transferred and found starting positions significantly outperformed their replacement-level projections. This wasn't a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention to the trend, but the volume of success stories in a single season represented a meaningful data point.
The brand infrastructure is real. The football results have been uneven. The 2026 season is when the program's direction becomes clearer.
Three years into the Deion Sanders era at Colorado, the program looks nothing like it did when he arrived — and that transformation is now being studied by athletic departments across the country as much as it's being followed by recruiting services. The numbers tell part of the story. Colorado's athletic budget has grown significantly. Their social media following dwarfs what it was in 2022. NIL deals flowing through the program have made Boulder a legitimate recruiting destination for players who, by traditional metrics, would never have considered the Big 12. What Sanders built isn't just a football program. It's a brand infrastructure attached to a football program.
Gundy, Franklin, Kelly, Napier, Pittman — all gone before November. The programs that moved quickest are entering spring with the most uncertainty.
The 2025 college football season will be studied for a long time, and not primarily for what happened on the field. The coaching carousel turned at a pace and scale that nobody in the sport had experienced in a single season. Mid-season firings became the norm rather than the exception. Programs that had been stable for years made decisions in October that would have been unthinkable in September. The list is worth sitting with. UCLA and Virginia Tech moved first, in September. Oklahoma State parted with Mike Gundy in late September after more than two decades — one of the longest-tenured head coaches in the Power conferences, gone before Halloween. Arkansas dismissed Sam Pittman shortly after. Penn State fired James Franklin in October. LSU let Brian Kelly go. Florida ended Billy Napier's tenure. Oregon State relieved Trent Bray. UAB fired Trent Dilfer. Colorado State moved on from Jay Norvell.
The Cornhuskers enter spring with momentum, a strong recruiting class, and questions at depth that the next eight weeks will start answering.
Nebraska opens spring practice this weekend, becoming the first Power 4 program to take the field in 2026. That's a distinction the program has held before — Nebraska has one of the stronger spring football traditions in college football — and this year it carries more weight than usual. The Cornhuskers enter the spring with genuine momentum. The 2025 season produced results that the program's fan base hadn't seen in years, and the 2026 recruiting class that came in during January was the most talent-dense group the program has assembled in recent memory. Spring is when that talent begins to be evaluated in pads, in real competition, against real depth charts.
The portal raised the bar for what programs ask of first-year players. These are the recruits entering spring with the most immediate pressure to prove themselves.
The 2026 recruiting class is entering college football programs this spring, and several of the highest-profile recruits in the cycle are walking into situations where the expectation is not that they'll contribute eventually — it's that they'll contribute now. This is the new normal. The transfer portal has created a paradox: while it gives players more movement options, it has also raised the floor of what programs expect from freshmen. When a program can add a veteran portal player at virtually any position at any point in the calendar, the freshman who takes the field in September has already cleared a meaningful threshold. He beat out the portal option. That means something.