Are Alabama, USC & Penn State legit title contenders in ‘26? | Always College Football

Always College Football with Greg McElroy

ESPN

Football, Sports

3.9 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2026

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

McElroy continues with his 2026 National Title contenders with Alabama, USC and Penn State. Does Lincoln Riley have enough on the roster to make a run at the CFP and National Title, will Matt Campbell, Rocco Becht and the rest of the Iowa State transfers be enough for Penn State to make a serious run at a title and now that the roster is completely Kalen DeBoer’s will Alabama have enough fire power to get back to winning national championships? Plus, McElroy breaks down the impact of Trinidad Chambliss and Joey Aguilar’s court cases and what it means for roster development in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	They're a team with a new identity.
0:02.0	They are going to have a lot of new faces, a lot of young players.
0:07.0	They do have a high-octane offense though, and they should have a chip on the shoulder from last year's loss in the Rose Bowl to Indiana.
0:17.0	I also think there's a lot of guys on this roster that are eager to prove that they want to show up.
0:24.9	They want to maintain the standard that's been expected at Alabama for a very long time.
0:33.7	Welcome in. It's always college football. I'm your host Greg McElroy. And today we're putting away the film study for a little bit. We're stepping away from the whiteboard. We might even pick up a lot of degree. Because if you look at the current landscape of college football, you're not studying currently the intricacies of running a 335 defense or the 425 defense or inside zone versus outside zone dynamic with your run game.
1:03.3	You're looking at a 15 page legal brief.
1:06.0	I feel like that's what I've been working on the last couple of weeks.
1:08.7	I'm about over it.
1:10.1	I'm not going to lie. I am ready to start diving into some of the teams,
1:13.8	which is what we've done the last couple weeks.
1:16.0	We have put together our championship contenders series that will wrap up today,
1:22.7	which is exciting.
1:23.8	We have 13 teams that we've given you so far.
1:26.5	We add three more to give you 16 teams that we think can realistically make a run, possibly win the national championship this year.
1:34.3	We also are going to hold back a couple teams from that championship contender series because there are a couple of things that we still need to find out before we include
1:46.5	a team like Ole Miss and the championship contenders because we're entering into the
1:51.6	courtroom era of college football.
1:54.3	So you could kind of forget about Heisman races.
1:57.2	The most important people right now for some teams aren't offensive coordinators or general managers.
2:05.1	They're judges in Lafayette County, Mississippi, or in Knox County, Tennessee.
2:11.5	So today we're going to dive in to the bizarre, high stakes, frankly, somewhat kind of hilarious sagas from a legal standpoint
	...

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