Bad schedules, bad injuries, bad luck, bad personal changes. It happens to the best of teams, and college football fans will usually move past one down year.They almost never accept two in a row. If a program is really that good, it proves that past success wasn't a blip, gets over problems in a flash, and then everything is back to normal.These five teams have all been fantastic over recent seasons, and all five struggled mightily last year. They're all about to bounce back this season.
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2025 College Football Bounceback Teams: Programs Poised for a Turnaround
5. Alabama
- Alabama 2025 Preview It's all relative. One college football team's clunker is another's dream season. At almost anywhere else, if you go 9-3 in the regular season and come within a whisker of making the College Football Playoff, you've done something right. At Alabama, the panic sirens go off.Bear Bryant himself could've taken over the Tide after Nick Saban, and there would've been a tough transition to deal with. On the plus side, the Vanderbilt loss was a blip, the Tennessee loss was close, and any year Bama blows out LSU and beats Auburn by two touchdowns is a success.In the second year under Kalen DeBoer, the team is good enough to not just get to the CFP but win it all. (But, just getting into the tournament would be a bounceback year.)
4. Washington
- Washington 2025 Preview After playing for the national title in the 2023 season, 2024 was supposed to be a down year, to a point.Washington lost quarterback Michael Penix Jr., along with almost all the stars from the high-powered offense, as head coach Kalen DeBoer took his talents to Tuscaloosa.Coming off a massive year at Arizona, head coach Jedd Fisch stepped in, started the rebuild, and it was the program's second losing season since 2009, including a brutal loss to Washington State and a tough bowl loss to Louisville in the final moments.There won't be a return to the success of two years ago, but Fisch did a great job through the portal, he has a potential star in quarterback Demond Williams, and the schedule has a base of six almost-certain wins to build off of.
3. Florida State
- Florida State 2025 Preview The Florida State football program let 2023 beat it twice.After the rough finish and heartbreak of not making the College Football Playoff, a tough loss to Georgia Tech in Ireland became an early breaking point in a brutal 2-10 season - the program's worst since going 1-10 in 1974.The Seminoles won't bounce all the way back, but if they can pull off a win over Alabama in the opener ...Even if that doesn't happen, split the dates with Miami and Clemson, and there's a real shot FSU could be playing for the ACC title.
2. Oklahoma
- Oklahoma 2025 Preview This needs to be more like a breakthrough season for head coach Brent Venables than a bounceback. With two 6-7 seasons wrapped around a 10-3 run in 2023 that wasn't as strong as the record made it appear, it's time for Oklahoma to be a player again.Yes, the second half of the schedule is brutal, and Michigan comes to Norman in Week 2, but it's Oklahoma. It's supposed to beat the great teams, and this year's version has the talent to do it.
1. Utah
- Utah 2025 Preview Utah was going to walk right into the Big 12 like it owned the place, go to the College Football Playoff, and all the success from the Kyle Whittingham era in the Pac-12 was going to transfer over. But instead of bouncing back from a disappointing 8-5 2023, it clunked with a 5-7 2024.Having four different quarterbacks see meaningful time was part of the problem, and now that's solved by getting Devon Dampier from New Mexico. He's just the highest-profile skill star from a tremendous haul of parts for the attack.The D will be fantastic, the O will be far better, and after losing four games by one score, here comes the pivot. This will be the season last year's was supposed to be.
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