The first games of the 2018 FBS season are now just 10 days away, and the countdown to the first full Saturday of action is now at 17.
The long, awful college football offseason is now just about over.
As always, there are going to be some big surprises this fall – teams picked to finish in the top-25 that fall on their butts, and others that come from nowhere to have much better years than expected.
Here’s a look at some of the teams from that second category – ones that could see their win totals jump by three or more from last year.
As an extra-special bonus, one is a Big Ten team and two of them are from right here in Ohio.
Florida (4-7 in 2017): Usually, you’d expect a team with a second-year coach to make a big jump, but Dan Mullen is poised for growth in his first year.
The Gators opened 3-1 in 2017 but… uhh… jumped the shark as Jim McIlwain’s tenure began to unravel.
The talent on this roster isn’t anywhere close to where it was under Urban Meyer, but it’s also not “lose 45-16 to Missouri” bad, either.
They’ll beat Charleston Southern, Idaho, and Colorado State out of conference, and should be favored against Kentucky, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, and maybe South Carolina in SEC play. LSU and at Mississippi State are winnable games as well.
The Gators won’t be great this year, but they’ll at least look vaguely like Florida again.
Baylor (1-11 in 2017): The Bears aren’t the easiest team to root for, given all that has happened around the program, but they’ll be better this year.
The 2017 season was an almost unfathomable disaster in Matt Rhule’s first year.
They lost to Liberty (LIBERTY!!!!) and UTSA (!!!!) to open the season, but bordered on competence toward the end of the year.
This year, QB Charlie Brewer (from the same high school as OSU freshman Matthew Baldwin) will be a full-time starter. That will help the offense find its footing.
They open with Abilene Christian, at UTSA, and then are home for Duke and Kansas. It’s possible that the Bears could hit four wins before the end of September.
Things get a little tougher after that, but games against Kansas State and Texas Tech are winnable as well.
Cincinnati (4-8 in 2017): Luke Fickell’s first year was rocky, but he clearly has the Bearcats on the upswing.
Recruiting had fallen off quite a bit toward the end of Tommy Tuberville’s tenure at UC, and Fickell has quickly fixed that.
The Bearcats were sixth in the AAC in recruiting rankings in Tuberville’s last full season (2016). They finished with the league’s best class in 2018.
Those recruits won’t be ready for a starring role this fall, but the Bearcats should be much better than they were a year ago.
There are only a few almost-certain losses on the schedule. The opener at UCLA doesn’t look promising, and a road date at UCF in November is going to be a loss as well.
Beyond that, there are a couple near-locks in the win column (Alabama A&M and East Carolina) and a whole bunch of toss-ups.
In order to hit seven wins, UC needs to break even on the road against Miami (OH), UConn, Temple, and SMU. That’s not a given, but it’s doable. Then they need to win three of the following at home: Ohio, Tulane, Navy, and USF.
Again, it’s not a lock, but it’s plausible.
There’s a pretty good chance the Bearcats go bowling this year, and could take another big step forward as Fickell’s recruiting starts to pay off in 2019.
Bowling Green (2-10 in 2017): The Falcons have been absolutely putrid in two seasons since Dino Babers left for Syracuse, but there are signs this could be the year they turn the corner.
BG was okay on offense, but a flaming garbage skow on defense in 2017.
This year, the offense should be even better and the defense… well… it can’t get worse. New defensive coordinator Carl Pelini should be entertaining, if nothing else.
The schedule is loaded with toss-up games. There are only four times the Falcons should be significant underdogs: at Oregon, at Georgia Tech, at Toledo, and at Ohio.
The rest of the slate is manageable, with home games against a suddenly less-intimidating Maryland, Eastern Kentucky, Miami (OH), Western Michigan, Kent State, and Buffalo. Road dates against Central Michigan and Akron are winnable as well.
Illinois (2-10 in 2017): First, a confession. I’m not all that sure that Illinois is going to hit five wins this year. Okay? But I promised you five teams, so here we are.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here’s another confession: I kind of think the Lovie Smith thing might eventually work out.
His program remodeling project enters its third season, but this isn’t just your basic “strip it to the studs and start over” remodel. Lovie burned that mother down in 2017.
But from the ashes of the Tim Beckman/Bill Cubit era came some of the smallest signs of hope imaginable.
The Illini started freshmen at more than half of their positions in 2017 and spent most of the season getting ritually disemboweled as a result.
But those freshmen are now sophomores. They’re not going to be great. They’re not even going to be good. But they should at least be better.
The Illini have two likely wins to start the year (Kent State and Western Illinois) and a reasonably friendly conference schedule. They get Rutgers and Maryland cross-division (albeit both on the road), and get Purdue, Minnesota, and Iowa at home.
Illinois isn’t going to make a bowl this year, but they should win more than two games. Three would be progress, four would be impressive, and five would have me claiming that I totally knew they were going to do it all along.
And don’t look now, but Smith has a pair of top-100 players committed for 2019.
Illinois isn’t ever going to supplant Ohio State as the perennial favorite in the conference. But they could be a couple years away from being a legitimate pain in the butt again.
