The 2025 college football season was that famous Cantina Bar scene in the original Star Wars. Whatever your poison, you had options. Underdog stories? Yup. Controversy? Of course. An interview with a borderline delirious Dan Lanning after an overtime win at Penn State? Apparently so. The whole point of that sequence in the movie was to introduce the main characters to a pilot who could fly them to safety. I like to imagine Lane Kiffin negotiating with similarly unsavory characters to escape an angry mob of hot yoga classmates in Oxford, Mississippi.

After the postseason, it’s post-mortem season. There is no shortage of What [INSERT TEAM] must do to [INSERT THING] in 2026 posts floating around the interwebs. We’ll get there at some point. In the meantime, we spent the week debating the 17 things that defined the year in college football. To paraphrase the wise prophet Whitesnake, we don’t know where we’re going, but we sure know where we’ve been.

I won’t give away the (full) game. We have two episodes for that (conveniently linked below). But I can tell you my own personal top five that resonates the most when thinking back:

It wasn’t just that Indiana won their first national championship in the football program’s dreadful 139 year history. It was the speed with which Curt Cignetti transformed the Hoosiers from David into Goliath. Usually there's a bit of a ramp up, you know? In just 26 months on the job, Cignetti now has 27 wins and a title to his name. To that end, we’ve had listeners writing in for the last month wondering when it’s time to start hating Indiana now that they seem poised to be a perennial favorite.

It’s impossible to tell the story of 2025 without the many facets of Indiana’s run. Furthermore, Cignetti’s newfound status as the most meme-able coach in college football has been one of the surprising perks of Indiana’s run. I love them all with my whole heart.

Diego Pavia made waves over the last few months, first for his reaction to missing out on the Heisman, then for his official height measurement at the Senior Bowl. But the point stands that Pavia was the catalyst behind one of college football’s other incredible turnaround stories at Vanderbilt over the last two seasons. How quickly we forget that, before Pavia arrived as a transfer, Clark Lea’s job in Nashville was on thin ice. And though Lea did a great job building a roster around Pavia, it was ultimately the quarterback who most embodied the spirit of a big game hunter that put the rest of the SEC on notice.

This one’s personal. By now, you all know I’m a Penn State grad. Before the season, I predicted a national championship. Nobody could’ve predicted what happened next.

After an overtime loss to Oregon, Penn State went into a tailspin, losing first to UCLA and next to Northwestern before firing James Franklin in the middle of the season. It was a stunning fall from grace for a program that made the national semifinals just a year ago, and a jarring reminder that coaching is a results-oriented business.

Finding a new coach was almost as cataclysmic. Despite overtures to big names, profanity-laced leaked audio, and being spurned by Kalani Sitake (partially because of the Crumbl cookie guy?), Penn State miraculously stuck the landing and ended up with Iowa State’s Matt Campbell.

Speaking of that Oregon-Penn State game, let’s talk about the moment we all realized that Dan Lanning is a special kind of crazy. Lanning admitted he let emotions get the best of him in a postgame interview after a thrilling 30-24 double overtime win at Beaver Stadium. In fairness, we were in the stands for that game and it did feel like a religious experience. Singularly, it felt like one of those college football moments that gave the season some texture.

To borrow a line from my friend Will Leitch, Lanning pisses intensity. Evidence has been mounting that he’s a different breed. Earlier in the year, he went shirtless and jumped in a pool in a recruit’s commitment video. In the College Football Playoff, he walked out the tunnel yelling “POUND OF FLESH!” before a game against Texas Tech. And those are just the public glimpses we’ve got of Lanning. Combined with his ruthlessness in the transfer portal and ability to wield a warchest of Nike money, Lanning always has a big game mentality. Now he just needs to win a few more big games.

Lane Kiffin has always been the main character in his own soap opera, but perhaps never more than the last few months of 2025. With LSU, Florida and others in hot pursuit, Kiffin cemented his status as a bad breaker-upper with how he eventually left Ole Miss—punctuated by, as Dan mentioned in our latest episode, “a tender hug” from ESPN’s Marty Smith after a tarmac interview.

It wasn’t just the will-he-or-won’t-he surrounding Kiffin’s fate. It was the way that LSU cut ties with Brian Kelly and the spectacle of politicians weighing in on the hire. Oh, and then there’s the added wrinkle of Ole Miss rallying, in spite of Kiffin, through the College Football Playoff to within a few plays of the title game.

As expected, Kiffin has done major redecorating in Baton Rouge via the transfer portal. We’ll soon find out if he was worth all the energy.

— Ty

Stay solid!