College Football Stock Watch: Why Penn State Is Trending Up and Alabama Isn’t

Think about this time a year ago.

Penn State entered the 2025 season as a top-10 team and a hot pick for the national title. 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.

This is a reminder of how quickly fortunes can change in college football. Teams that make a splash in the offseason don’t always deliver.

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

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

Klatt: Matt Cambell is now the new head coach at Penn State. This program went 7-6 last season and I think there is clearly an upward trend. James Franklin had a very specific problem: losing important games. Once they lost that game at Oregon, the season spiraled out of control.

Campbell is a great fit at Penn State. His 10 seasons at Iowa State should tell us one thing: This team is going to be solid.

In this era, there will be years where you hit the schedule lottery, and Penn State will face what I would say is a soft Big Ten schedule. They brought in a bunch of guys from Iowa State, including quarterback Rocco Becht, whose 39 career starts are the most among returning quarterbacks in college football, and they have a schedule that actually has a nine-win floor.

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

Surely they are going to win more than seven games. No doubt. I think they could be a 10-2 team fighting for a spot in the College Football Playoffs.

Klatt: Alabama will be a good football team, but I don’t know if that will be enough. The Crimson Tide is losing its most important player, Ty Simpson, who led them to some of those victories last year. Now you don’t have it. They won 11 games, made 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 wonderful 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 run the football. In fact, it’s shocking to see Alabama line up and not be able to run the ball.

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

This will be a young team. They won’t have experience, particularly at quarterback. In my opinion, experience at the quarterback position is the most important ingredient for any team in the country, and it is very difficult to have great success with an inexperienced quarterback.

Klatt: Lane Kiffin is a great coach. He’s done this before. He took Ole Miss, got a ton of transfers, rebuilt the culture and had a lot of success. It’s not that I have 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 been doing that. They went 7-6 and fired their head coach. Now you look at the talent they’ve brought in, including quarterback Sam Leavitt, and wonder: Is this really a seven-win team?

The answer is no. At all. I think this team is going to compete for a spot in the College Football Playoffs.

LSU hasn’t finished in the top 10 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’s going to change with Kiffin and all the talent that’s been infused into the roster.

Klatt: 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 himself has said that he never wanted to be a head coach. Now he’s been pushed into that position because Ole Miss really had no other move to make. He did a great job, but the bar is simply too high.

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

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

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

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

That should sound familiar: It’s exactly what Curt Cignetti did when he left James Madison for Indiana. To me, this feels like Indiana Light.

You could see a major 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 and recruit talent. There is a lot of energy in Westwood and they are recruiting at a high level.

Klatt: I believe in the foundation of this program, but Illinois has won 19 games the last two seasons. This is truly sustained success for a program that didn’t have much before Bret Bielema’s arrival.

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

Not every program can be great every year. We see it with Georgia and Ohio State. Maybe we’ll see it 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 drop. Then they will gain experience, get veterans, fill the gaps and be very good in a couple of years. You’re going to have these drops before you can have the kind of success they had, especially after a two-year 19-win streak.

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

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

I’m buying Florida. It may not be an immediate push toward the playoffs, but I’m definitely buying an improvement over a 4-8 season a year ago after they fired Billy Napier as their head coach.

Klatt: Last year, Vanderbilt set a program record with 10 wins. Now they have to replace that team’s entire engine in Heisman finalist Diego Pavía.

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

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

Klatt: Say what you want about James Franklin and what he did in big games at Penn State, but the truth is, the guy can coach. He raised the level of Penn State and I think he’s going to raise the level of Virginia Tech.

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

Franklin retained Brent Pry, who is now the defensive coordinator. When Pry was defensive coordinator at Penn State, that was a marriage that really worked. They had one of the best defenses in the conference and, for that matter, 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. That 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 qualify and maybe even advance to the ACC championship game.

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

They won nine games last year, the most since 2016, but now have to replace King and both coordinators. Losing that kind of continuity and experience is often a recipe for taking a step back.

Georgia Tech also has 11 games against Power 4 opponents this year, including non-conference games against Tennessee and Georgia. That’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 bouncing back in the future.