Barstool Sports’ Brandon Walker Previews the 2026 CFB Season

The thing college football fans get wrong every year, according to Brandon Walker, is deciding a team cannot win because it never has.

"If I were to sit here and pick Texas to win the national championship, somebody on the internet would say Texas, Steve Sarkisian, they can't do it," he said. Oregon and Dan Lanning, they can't do it. Marcus Freeman has never won one, so how could he.

Then Walker ran the counterexamples, and they land hard.

Had Indiana ever done anything before they did it? Had Ryan Day broken through at Ohio State before he did it? Had Kirby Smart beaten Alabama consistently before he won two in a row?

No, no, and no.

The preseason ranking he thinks will look foolish is Texas A&M, and he has the receipts. Last season the Aggies made the playoff after opening SEC play against teams ranked 10 through 16 in the conference, which Walker calls a statistical anomaly that will never happen again. They played Texas and lost. They played Miami and scored three points. With the turnover on both lines, he does not see it holding.

But his more interesting point was about the two teams ranked above them, and it is about scheduling, which he thinks is the most underdiscussed force in the sport.

Ohio State and Texas both deserve their rankings and both have brutal schedules. They play each other in week two. Ohio State draws something like six or seven top-15 teams, with Oregon at home and Indiana, USC and Texas on the road.

"Somebody in the top five is going to fall out," Walker said. "And I think it's going to be because of schedule."

On Indiana opening sixth, he was blunt: had Georgia or Alabama won the title, they would be first.

He does not accept the premise that the Hoosiers cannot repeat, and his reasoning is organizational. This is a staff that has figured out the current era better than anyone, keeping veteran players in the program and maintaining coordinator continuity year over year. They return roughly 90 percent of last year's defense.

Losing Fernando Mendoza, a Heisman winner and number one pick, triggers the automatic assumption that they drop off. Walker rejects it with the best metaphor of the interview.

They got Mendoza off the transfer portal buffet. Why can't they go back to the buffet?

"That's what a buffet is. You keep going back and getting food."

He thinks Josh Hoover can be a delicious quarterback for them.

That prompted a genuine detour about actual buffets, in which Walker nominated Pap's Country Style Buffet in Ackerman, Mississippi, Bones countered with Brown's Country Store in Benton, Arkansas, and both men agreed there is no reason to be beholden to national chains. Walker also accused Bones of losing his buffet roots, on the grounds that he now employs a chef.

Then Alabama, which Walker knew was coming.

"You're just poking me with the old Alabama stick."

His case is not that this is a bad team. It is that two decades on top of the sport cannot continue indefinitely, and the signs are everywhere. Last year they opened with a loss to Florida State, which he called depressing, and finished by losing to Indiana 38-3.

"Did you ever think you'd see a world where Alabama laid down to Indiana?"

Bones pushed back that Indiana ran everyone. Walker did not accept it, and his counter was specific. Ohio State lost to Indiana 13-10. Penn State made them win in the final seconds. Oregon tested them. Those are elite teams playing them close. Alabama lost by 35.

Ranked inside the SEC, Walker puts Texas, Ole Miss, Texas A&M, Georgia and maybe LSU ahead of them. Still a respectable top-15 program, hanging on by a thread to the idea that it sits on top of the sport.

The specific failure that bothers him most is the run game, and he is not sure where it went.

"When you think of Nick Saban, you think of giant ghastly linebackers that get off the bus just hitting everybody," he said. And running backs nobody wants to tackle in the fourth quarter. Kalen DeBoer may have quarterback play, and Keelon Russell may be able to throw to Ryan Williams, but until Alabama can pound the rock late against LSU or Georgia or Texas A&M, Walker cannot believe in them.

On Lane Kiffin, he separated the two questions cleanly and answered both.

"As a person, what's the point? I'll never find myself in a position where I need to trust Lane Kiffin."

As a coach, he trusts him implicitly, and the argument is the record. Ten-win seasons four times at Ole Miss, a place that had never won at that level in program history. Great quarterback play, great offense, strong organizational skills, good defensive hires. Walker calls him a top-five coach in the country.

"Is he a top five human being in college football? Maybe, maybe not. But he doesn't have to be. He's paid to win football games." And LSU, he added, has made very clear it is interested in winning football games and not much else.

Asked what Kiffin's return to Oxford will be like, Walker did not hedge.

"Pure absolute chaos on a stick."

He reached for Tennessee finally beating Alabama at Neyland, the field storming, the 52-49 scoreline, and thinking that if you could bottle that, it would be college football. He expects Oxford turned up further, because this one adds two top-15 teams, great players, and a level of visceral hatred he described as almost dangerous.

On Bill Belichick, Walker's recommendation was that the plug be pulled, with an immediate and emphatic clarification that he meant the North Carolina experiment and not the man.

His read is that it has turned in a year and a half. Nobody has hope for it, nobody looks forward to it, everyone thinks it is a disaster, and nobody wants an all-time great going out this way. His proposal is to act like it never happened and put Belichick back in the NFL somewhere.

He did concede a professional conflict of interest, since having Belichick in college football is useful to a college football media personality.

The rapid fire ran clean. Most overrated, Texas A&M. Most underrated, Louisville, on the strength of a program-building coach, one of the best running backs in the country, and a schedule that falls off sharply after Ole Miss and SMU in the first three weeks.

Best quarterback, Trinidad Chambliss, which Bones assumed would sting a Mississippi State man.

It did not.

"Brandon Walker is a truth teller."

Coach under the most pressure is Sarkisian, because of the roster and the money invested, and because he could go 9-3 and get fired. DeBoer has more room, helped by last year's playoff berth and a far more forgiving schedule, though Walker thinks 8-4 is close to rock bottom and 7-5 gets a move made.

Best home field advantage is LSU's Tiger Stadium, and Walker used the question to make a point about the category itself, which is that most people answering it are really telling you which team has been the best for a decade.

Funniest possible national champion is Purdue, given the athletic director who recently suggested that winning championships is why you come to Purdue.

His actual pick is Oregon. Best roster in football, a scary defensive line, and a group of players who came back when they did not have to and could be making first- or second-round money right now. They have reached the green repeatedly and had disappointing finishes, losing to Ohio State and to Indiana in games they were not ready for.

"You keep getting on the green, the putt will eventually fall."

He will not touch USC. Every August the story is that the defense turns a corner, and every year they lose at Illinois in late September.

"If somebody's going to be left holding the Lincoln Riley bag, it is not going to be me."

Penn State, though, is his schedule play. They miss Oregon, Ohio State, Indiana and Iowa, four of the top five teams in the Big Ten. Matt Campbell arrives bringing essentially the Iowa State roster, quarterback included, and Campbell is a consistent coach.

Are they a top-12 team? No. But Walker thinks the schedule gets them to the playoff anyway in Campbell's first year.