Seven weeks are down and six regular-season weeks are still to come in the 2026 college football season. As the sport’s pecking order takes shape, conversations will circle back to the College Football Playoff and which 12 teams should be left standing after conference championship Saturday.
The first half of the season delivered some classic moments. There was Texas’s rally to knock off Ohio State, Georgia winning for the first time since 2014 in Tuscaloosa, BYU holding off Notre Dame in Provo and, of course, Ole Miss surviving Lane Kiffin’s return to Oxford. But there was also the unexpected, from Michigan’s Bail Mary win against Western Michigan to Iowa’s walk-off in the Big House and UCLA’s road upset of Oregon with a backup quarterback.
