College Football Stock Watch: Why Penn State is Trending Up and Alabama Is Not

Think back to this time a year ago.

Penn State entered the 2025 season as a top-10 team and a trending national title pick. 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 collapsed during a six-game losing streak.

It’s a reminder of how quickly fortunes can change in college football. The teams that generate buzz during the offseason don’t always deliver.

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

FOX Sports senior 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 it’s definitely an upward trend. James Franklin had a very specific problem: losing big matches. Once they lost that game to Oregon, the season spiraled out of control.

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

Around this time, you’re going to have years where you just hit the schedule lottery, and Penn State is about to face what I would say is a soft Big Ten schedule. They brought in a ton 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 nine wins.

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

They will definitely win more than seven games. There is no doubt. I think they could be a 10-2 team fighting for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

Klatt: Alabama will be a good football team, but I don’t know if that will be enough. The Crimson Tide are losing their most important player in Ty Simpson, who led them to some of those wins last year. Now you don’t have it anymore. They won 11 games, reached the College Football Playoff and played in the Rose Bowl. They won’t do it again.

Alabama doesn’t have a terribly difficult schedule, at least by SEC standards, but this team won’t be as good as it was a year ago.

I love Kalen DeBoer. I think he’s a wonderful football coach. The one thing he struggled with throughout his career was finding a reliable running game to complement what has always been an elite passing attack. Last year, Alabama couldn’t run the football. It’s actually shocking to see Alabama line up and not be able to run the football.

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

It will be a young team. They’re going to be inexperienced, especially 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 achieve high-end success with an inexperienced quarterback.

Klatt: Lane Kiffin is a great coach. He’s already done this. 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. LSU’s expectation is to compete at the top, and they haven’t done that. They went 7-6 and fired their head coach. Now you look at the talent they brought in — including quarterback Sam Leavitt — and you wonder: Is this really a seven-win team?

The answer is no. Absolutely not. I think this team is going to compete for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

LSU hasn’t finished in the top 10 since winning the national championship in 2019. It’s crazy. This is too good a program to get stuck in this kind of streak, and I think that will change with Kiffin and all the talent that has 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 said he never wanted to be a head coach. Now he was put in this position because Ole Miss really had nothing left to do. He’s done a great job, but the bar is just too high.

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

You can’t expect this level of success to continue immediately. For decades, it was largely a .500 program. I think they’re taking 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 was the hiring they made that got me excited about the future of this program. Bob Chesney is a very good football coach.

UCLA is close to bringing back QB Nico Iamaleava, and they have added over 40 incoming transfers. So they have experience at quarterback and a significant infusion of talent on the team. And Chesney brings with him seven coaches from James Madison, including his offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator and special teams coach.

This should sound familiar: That’s exactly what Curt Cignetti did when he left James Madison for Indiana. To me it looks 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 quarterback and a real coaching staff that can go out there and recruit talent. There is a lot of energy at Westwood and they are recruiting at a high level.

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

When you look at their offense, Luke Altmyer has been a big part of their success. Their offensive line was a big part of it as well. Now they’re replacing four starters up front, they have to replace their top 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 see it with programs like Miami or Oregon. These teams have the resources to recruit and move 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 decline. Then they will gain experience, recruit veterans, fill holes and become very good in a few years. You’re going to experience those lows before you can experience the type of success they had, especially after a two-year stretch with 19 wins.

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

Now Jon Sumrall is coming. He is 43-12 as a head coach and has consistently won wherever he is. He’s a guy who knows how to coach. He 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 strong SEC program.

I’m buying Florida. It may not be a playoff push right away, but I’m definitely buying an improvement from a 4-8 season a year ago after firing Billy Napier as head coach.

Klatt: Last year, Vanderbilt set a program record with 10 wins. They now need to replace the entire engine of this team with Heisman runner-up Diego Pavia.

I know they signed some top talent, especially 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. Should we really expect them to win 10 games in one go again? It 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 to move forward in the years to come. 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 will raise the level of Virginia Tech.

Virginia Tech has gone four straight seasons without being ranked at any point. This program should be better than that.

Franklin retained Brent Pry, who is now the defensive coordinator. When Pry was defensive coordinator at Penn State, it was a marriage that really worked. They had one of the best defenses in the conference – and really in the country. So he’s back in a role that I think he can excel at.

They have 27 incoming transfers, including 12 from Penn State. It’s going to raise the level of talent, and the ACC isn’t a very tough conference. This is a team that I think can, at some point this season, 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 few very solid seasons. Haynes King was the driving force behind that success, as was Diego Pavia at Vanderbilt.

They won nine games last year – their most since 2016 – but now they must replace King and both coordinators. Losing that kind of continuity and experience is usually a recipe for stepping back.

Georgia Tech also has 11 games against Power 4 opponents this year, including non-conference games against Tennessee and Georgia. It’s not an easy schedule. This is not a team that is going to win nine more games.

I think they will take a step back this season before rebuilding in the future.