College Football Stock Watch: Why Penn State Is Trending Up, 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 filled with promise had unraveled during a six-game losing streak. That’s a reminder of how quickly fortunes can change in college football. The teams generating 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.” Klatt: Matt Cambell is now the new head coach at Penn State. This program was 7-6 last season, and I think this is clearly trending up. James Franklin had one very specific issue: losing big games. Once they lost that Oregon game, the season spiraled out of control.Campbell is a perfect 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, you’re going to have years when you just hit the schedule lottery, and Penn State is set to face 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 floor of nine wins.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 they can do some damage with.They’re certainly going to win more than seven games. There’s no doubt. I think they could be a 10-2 team fighting for a College Football Playoff spot. Klatt: Alabama is going to be a good football team, but I don’t know if that’s going to be enough. The Crimson Tide are losing their most important player in Ty Simpson, who carried 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’re not doing that again.Alabama doesn’t have a terribly difficult schedule, at least by SEC standards, but this isn’t going to be as good a team as it was a year ago.I like Kalen DeBoer. I think he’s a wonderful football coach. The one thing he’s 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. It’s actually shocking to watch Alabama line up and not be able to run the football. They’ve got 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. Are they going to be great on defense? I think that remains to be seen. This is going to be a young team. They’re going to be inexperienced, particularly at quarterback. In my estimation, experience at the quarterback position is the most important ingredient for any team in the country, and it’s very difficult to have top-end success with an inexperienced quarterback. Klatt: Lane Kiffin is a great coach. He’s done this before. He took Ole Miss, brought in a ton of transfers, rebuilt the culture and had a lot of 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 been doing that. 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 College Football Playoff spot. LSU has zero top-10 finishes since winning the national championship in 2019. That’s wild. This is too good of 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 has said himself that he never wanted to 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 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 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 that level of success to continue immediately. For decades, this was largely a .500 program. I think they take a step back from a 13-2 season and a College Football Playoff semifinal appearance. 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 really good football coach. UCLA is set to bring back QB Nico Iamaleava, and they’ve added more than 40 incoming transfers. So they’ve got experience at quarterback and a significant infusion of talent across the roster. And Chesney is bringing seven coaches from James Madison with him, including his offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator and 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’ve got experience and talent at the quarterback position and a real coaching staff that can go out there and recruit talent. There’s a lot of energy in Westwood, and they’re recruiting at a high level. Klatt: 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 it before Bret Bielema arrived. When you look at their offense, Luke Altmyer was a huge part of their success. Their offensive line was a huge part of it as well. Now they’re replacing four starters up front, they have to replace their top wide receiver in Hank Beatty, and they also lost their defensive coordinator to Notre Dame. Not every program can be great every single year. We see it with Georgia and Ohio State. Maybe we 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’s going to be a dip. Then they’ll gain experience, get veterans, fill in the holes, and be very good in a couple of years. You’re going to have these dips before you can have the type of success that they had, especially after a two-year stretch with 19 wins. Klatt: It’s easy to go up from 4-8. Florida has had just one winning season in the last five years. The Gators should be better than that, but they haven’t been. Now Jon Sumrall comes in. He has a 43-12 record as a head coach and has consistently won wherever he’s been. This is a guy who knows how to coach. He’s brought in a lot of talent, and this is a program that should be able to recruit and sustain 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. Klatt: 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, particularly 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 all of a sudden win 10 games again? That was a program record. I like Clark Lea, but very similar to Illinois, this is a program that is going to take a step back in order to move forward in the coming years. I’m 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 believe he’s going to raise the level of 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, that 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. That’s going to raise the level of talent, 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 toward 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 engine of that success, similar to Diego Pavia at Vanderbilt. They won nine games last year — their most since 2016 — but now they have to 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. That’s not an easy schedule. This is not a team that’s going to win nine games again. I think they will take a step back this season before building back up in the future.