The Solid Verbal College Football

College football is finally here, which means there’s only one piece of preseason business left: putting our predictions on the record. In this episode, we each build a complete 12-team College Football Playoff field, debate the teams that just missed the cut, seed the bracket and play the whole thing forward through the national championship.
Along the way, we wrestle with some of the biggest questions surrounding the 2026 season. How many SEC teams can survive the league’s new nine-game schedule? Does the Big Ten get a fourth team? Can the Big 12 produce multiple playoff teams? And which Group of Five contender makes it through a particularly messy race for the automatic bid? There are also some aggressive calls involving Alabama, Houston, New Mexico, Notre Dame and several teams sitting right on the postseason bubble.
We work through potential first-round games, playoff paths and semifinal matchups before putting our national championship predictions on the record. Some picks felt safer than others, a few are almost guaranteed to come back and haunt us, and somehow we independently landed in exactly the same place at the very end.
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Fantasy Things is back! In our annual celebration of everything strange, stupid and uniquely college football, we draft the moments, tropes, broadcast oddities and completely unforeseen bits of nonsense we want on our team for the 2026 season. We’re not picking players or predicting champions. We’re trying to anticipate the stuff that makes you stop on a Saturday afternoon and think, “Of course this is happening in college football.”
This year’s board gets weird quickly. We get into coaches behaving strangely, broadcasts going off the rails, new ways technology could make the sport even more ridiculous, and a few very specific scenarios that feel just plausible enough to happen. There are also some long-shot “penny stocks” at the end, including a handful of ideas that are probably terrible bets but would be incredible if they somehow hit.
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Support the show!: https://www.patreon.com/solidverbal
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College football is almost here, so we brought ESPN's Bill Connelly back on the show to help us separate the teams worth believing in from the ones carrying more risk than the preseason conversation might suggest. We start with Bill's annual look at the most important players in the sport and work through the quarterbacks, transfers and returning stars who could swing the 2026 season in either direction.
From there, the conversation turns to some of the biggest contenders in the country. How good does Keelon Russell need to be for Alabama to get back into the national championship picture? Are we overlooking the questions surrounding Texas despite all of its star power? Which quarterback situations are the most terrifying, how much should we trust Penn State, and which teams look very different once Bill compares what the numbers say with what he actually believes? We also bounce through the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC, talk potential chaos games, the wildest weekend on the 2026 schedule and the conference race that deserves more attention than it is getting.
Plus, Bill gives us teams that could be much more fun than expected, a few Week 0 and Week 1 games worth circling, and one program college football fans should consider adopting for the season.
After Bill leaves, we somehow end up revisiting Ty's old wedding betting pool, complete with ceremony over-unders, music props and some extremely specific long-shot wagers.
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Support the show!: https://www.patreon.com/solidverbal
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In this college football podcast episode, we react to the first AP Top 25 of the 2026 season and our first preseason poll as official AP voters. We run through the top of the rankings, compare the national poll with our own ballot and talk about what it feels like to put actual votes behind all the opinions we’ve spent the offseason developing. Which teams already look a little too high or too low, and how much should anyone really trust a preseason poll before the games begin?
Then it’s time for some Zagriculture. We take a bank of familiar college football narratives and draft the ones we’re most willing to push back against. Is Notre Dame really just a product of its schedule? Is Dabo Swinney actually cooked at Clemson? Can USC finally build a respectable defense under Lincoln Riley? What should we expect from Oregon when the biggest games arrive in January, and how much faith should anyone have in Lane Kiffin eventually delivering a championship at LSU? Along the way, we also wander into Ole Miss, Iowa and several other preseason assumptions that may look very different a few months from now.
Plus, Ty gets talked into an alarmingly specific Iowa offensive prediction, Dan dabbles with weird phrasing, and we continue preparing for Week 0. Sign up to support the show at Verballers.com.
Support the show!: https://www.patreon.com/solidverbal
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In this college football podcast episode, we take one final deep breath after our marathon run of 2026 conference previews and turn the show over to the Verballerhood for our August Q&A. With the season finally within reach, we dig into the teams we find most interesting, the best dark horse candidates around the country, and one of the questions that could define the expanded College Football Playoff era: What would a convincing 9-3 playoff resume actually look like?
We also zoom out on the changing power structure of college football. Was Lane Kiffin right to bet that a job like LSU still offers advantages that programs further down the traditional hierarchy simply cannot match? Has the transfer portal, money and increased player movement truly leveled the field, or have the old powers merely lost some of their margin for error? Plus, we compare a handful of the biggest coaching moves from the offseason, wonder what issue could become college football’s next great existential fight, and ask whether all that player movement could eventually take some heat out of the sport’s biggest rivalries.
And because it’s a Q&A, things inevitably get weird. We debate the ideal school for a punter, investigate sports conspiracies, build a college football soundtrack out of movie scores, evaluate SEC stadium bucket lists and learn that Dan has apparently developed a neighborhood reputation as an illicit dealer of highly coveted pizza cheese.
Support the show!: https://www.patreon.com/solidverbal
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