College football’s regular season is halfway over, with 136 of 138 FBS teams having played five or six games. The sport’s pinnacle still seems elusive: Georgia is clearly No. 1, and eight other undefeated teams follow them. Texas, Ohio State and Alabama are among the one-loss teams that look like legitimate title contenders. But it will still take several weeks to get a detailed picture at the summit.
We shouldn’t reserve judgment on some of the season’s biggest disasters, however. The halfway point is a good time to take stock of the teams that have already ensured wasted 2026 seasons. With that in mind, here is my ranking of the worst disasters of the first half of the year. What makes a disaster? Not just be bad, but be wasteful. This is a list of missed opportunities.
There’s a good chance that the eventual No. 1 on this list is the Oregon Ducks, the preseason No. 2 team that has already lost two games and may or may not have a healthy QB. I’m going to reserve “disastrous” judgment on the Ducks for now, because 1) I had already picked them to miss the playoffs this year, expecting them to be a top five team to miss. And, 2) I’m not going to catastrophize a home loss to a very good UCLA team while a backup QB was playing, and I think the Ducks still have a chance to make the dance if Dante Moore returns healthy in the near future. But the Ducks could work their way to the top of this list in short order, although I think it’s OK to reserve judgment for a few more weeks.
List budget range: $45 to $50 million
The stereotype of Aggie football is that this program spends a lot and wins little. No season has ever lived up to the bill as succinctly as this one. The problem isn’t just that A&M is already well out of the playoff race. That’s because the program seems to have declined in every way after winning its first 11 games last year. Quarterback Marcel Reed went from 8.4 to 5.8 yards per pass and threw as many interceptions (six) as touchdowns on his way to a career high in sacks caught. The defense hasn’t found a replacement for last year’s edge player, Cashius Howell, who went to the NFL and left an 11.5 sack hole that no one is close to filling. (The Aggies have a player with more than one sack. He has two.) Mike Elko is openly feuding with a specific fan forum, and in two months he’ll probably be 0-3 against Texas since that rivalry restarted in 2024. Not a great return on investment.
List budget range: $29 to $32 million
The Nittany Lions have lost three straight, but their problems began last fall and winter, when AD Pat Kraft took 54 days to find a new coach after firing James Franklin. After not finding at least one coach he wanted (BYU’s Kalani Sitake) and probably a few others, the admin landed on Matt Campbell. Is Campbell a good football coach who transformed Iowa State? True, but Penn State took so long to hire him that it missed National Signing Day and gave the program a short runway until the January transfer window, during which Campbell also had to build a team. The result was a missing class of new players, which amounted to an import of Campbell’s core to Iowa State with few bells and whistles around him. This lack of talent showed up in a big way, notably behind center, where quarterback Rocco Becht was one of the worst players in the power conferences. Year 2 will tell the story here, but Year 1 is a waste because Penn State will rarely have a more accessible Big Ten schedule than this season. There’s no Ohio State, no Indiana, no Oregon, and still nothing good to report.
List budget range: $22 to $25 million
Louisville has one of the most talented teams in the ACC. The Cardinals had every chance of being the team that faced Miami in the conference championship game. But they have already almost ruled that out with three early defeats, two of them in the league. The best part is that none of these losses were necessary. In Week 1 against Ole Miss, a series of penalties helped give the game to the Rebels, including one that gave Ole Miss a second chance at the missed decisive field goal. In Week 4 against Wake Forest, more penalties (including a series of 15-yard personal fouls) condemned them to another three-point loss. In Week 5, they lost by a field goal once again, this time to an NC State program that was running around the drain. Turnovers doomed them in that one, on a day when Louisville won the yards-per-play battle, 8.8 yards to 5.9, but fumbled five times and lost three. A sad loss of season.
Listing Budget Range: Group of 6
From 2022 to 2025, four FBS teams have won more games than the Green Wave: Georgia, Ohio State, Oregon and Michigan. The Wave accomplished this successfully when they lost head coach Willie Fritz to Houston, replacing him with Jon Sumrall, who led them to the playoffs last year as he left to take over at Florida. To replace himTulane selected Will Hall, who had gone 14-30 as head coach of a much inferior program, Southern Miss, from 2021 to 2024. Hall’s selling point was that he had been a key assistant under Fritz and was on staff again under Sumrall last year, when the Wave won the American and made the playoffs. It’s pretty good, but it used to work better, and it doesn’t work. The Wave is 2-3 after a loss at Army. They are scoring 18.4 points per game and have yet to find a quarterback. There is no reason why this team couldn’t have challenged for the American and the Group of 6 playoff spot.
List budget range: $21 to $25 million
Last winter, Husky QB Demond Williams attempted to put aside his contract and jump into the transfer portal. The school gently reminded him that he had a contract and he wouldn’t get out of it so easily. Williams later returned to the program. You can kind of see – besides a potential payday – why he might have wanted to leave. Washington’s offensive line is really bad for a second straight year, and the defense hit a new low by allowing 41 points to Iowa in a loss Friday night. The embarrassment wasn’t the highlight as much as the leaks from UW’s back-end coverage and whatever you’d call that wrestling display:
Washington was in the national championship game just three years ago. This now looks like a solidly sub-half Big Ten team. Are these guys a good fit for the Big Ten? We can’t even blame Iowa’s debacle on money, considering the Hawkeyes are spending late in the conference.
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