Fornelli’s 2026 bet on redemption: Five college football teams he thinks can beat preseason expectations

Tom Fornelli’s latest college football preview makes an unusually pointed argument about what separates teams that improve from teams that repeat the same mistakes. In his view, the most dangerous error for a program is not simply losing, but interpreting a setback as bad luck instead of a coaching and execution problem that must be corrected. That framing runs through a list of five teams he believes are positioned to outperform common preseason assumptions in 2026.

Fornelli’s column is structured less like a pure projection exercise and more like a scouting report on habits. The premise is that certain teams enter the offseason with enough continuity and development to avoid the same breakdowns that contributed to disappointing outcomes. If a program can convert its offseason work into cleaner starts, more reliable situational play, and fewer avoidable errors, it can produce a jump that looks surprising only to people who treat preseason narratives as destiny.

A key theme in the piece is the relationship between expectation and variance. Preseason win totals and media storylines tend to reward stability and punish uncertainty, even when uncertainty is the product of young rosters, system transitions, or simply injuries that eventually explain the results. Fornelli’s counterpoint is that teams do not always “learn” when luck changes. He argues that coaching staffs and leaders have to learn while they are still in the middle of the work, or the next season will bring the same problems wearing a new jersey number.

Because preseason expectations often harden into talking points months before training camp, Fornelli’s list effectively asks readers to look past the most recent narrative label. The teams on the roster of his argument, in concept, share the ability to turn offseason preparation into immediate game-day advantage. That can come from player development, better scheming for strengths, and more disciplined execution when games tighten. In that sense, his approach treats the offseason not as a calendar, but as the mechanism for avoiding repeat mistakes.

The larger college football context also matters. With roster churn and constant roster building through recruiting and the transfer portal, many teams have reasons to be inconsistent, especially early in a new offensive or defensive identity. Fornelli’s thesis leans toward the view that some programs have reached the stage where their “building” phase has matured into operational competence. When that happens, the gap between last year’s impression and next year’s reality can narrow quickly enough to influence win totals, conference standing, and the pecking order for late-season matchups that shape postseason resumes.

There is, however, an important caveat. Without official confirmation or a roster-by-roster accounting in the available material, the specifics of which programs are included in Fornelli’s list, what he cites as their primary path to improvement, and how those paths relate to projected win totals cannot be verified here. College football previews also carry a built-in limitation: they can identify tendencies and potential, but they cannot guarantee that health, scheduling, and in-season adjustments will cooperate.

What to watch next, if you are trying to evaluate this concept the way Fornelli appears to encourage, is whether the teams in question show evidence of change early in camp and preseason game action. Look for improved fundamentals under pressure, clearer roles for key players, and fewer repeated errors that typically reveal themselves in late-game execution. If those indicates match the thesis, 2026 could include at least a few “why didn’t we see this coming?” seasons, driven by programs that actually internalized the lessons of their most painful moments.