Why 2025 might be the most chaotic college football season yet

Experience still matters in today's transfer era, but it's becoming harder and harder to find.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Bad news this week for a fool like me who liked to think we could reasonably predict the future quality of college football teams. I think 2025 is going to be the most chaotic season yet.

Last season felt pretty chaotic with Indiana, SMU and Arizona State making surprise runs to the first 12-team playoff. Syracuse, BYU and Illinois all won double-digit games, beating their preseason win totals from the oddsmakers by at least three games, while five power-conference teams—Utah, Florida State, Oklahoma State, Kansas and Arizona—fell at least three¹ games short of their projected number.

With the benefit of hindsight, it makes some sense to point out that 2024 was the year with the lowest average returning production in college football, per the method of Bill Connelly of ESPN, in at least a decade. The new numbers for 2025 arrived this week and teams have even less continuity year over year than last season. On average, an FBS team is returning just over half (53.7%) of its production, down from 60% in 2024 and 63% in 2019, the last pre-Covid season and first to include the transfer portal.

We’ve been headed to this point for a while, but what does it mean now that we’ve arrived? There’s the big-picture to consider and then the Nebraska angles.