College football Week 1 picks

As the excitement of college football's second year of the 12-team playoff dawns, Robert Perea unveils his top picks for Week 1.

Robert Perea
08/28/2025 01:51 AM

By Robert Perea

The second year of the 12-team college football playoff is upon us, and no matter how much the game changes off the field, with conference realignment, the transfer portal, and now revenue sharing to go along with NIL allowing players to cash, I still love the actual game on the field as much as I ever have.

I’ve said before how much the night before the first full Saturday of the season feels like Christmas Eve to me, and one thing the all the new changes have done is make it even more of a surprise to get up in the morning and see what’s under the tree.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I actually like the transfer portal. Under the old rules, if your team was terrible, it probably would take three years to get significantly better, because teams were limited to 25 new scholarships per year. Now a terrible team can replace the entire roster, and a bad team can become a good team immediately. Like Arizona State did last year, making the playoffs after going 3-9 the year before.

It does make predicting the first couple of weeks much tougher, because you can’t just count on improvement or regression based on the number of players coming back from last year. But that means there’s a lot of assumptions in the lines, and if you’re willing to dig, you can find games where those assumptions are wrong.

Here’s hoping I found a couple of those this week. Next week Jim Vallet will rejoin me, adding his NFL picks and witty insights into the world of sports.

East Carolina +14 at NC State: The Pirates beat NC State in the Military Bown in Annapolis, MD to end last season as a 7-point underdog. Although Rahjai Harris basically won that game by himself for ECU and he’s now graduated, the Pirates return quarterback Katin Houser. The Pirates were liming along at 3-4 last year when head coach Mike Houston was fired and defensive coordinator Blake Harrell was named the interim coach. Harrell’s first move was to make Houser the starting quarterback, and the Pirates rolled down the stretch. NC State QB CJ Bailey got thrown into the fray because of injuries last year when they had planned to redshirt him. He acquitted himself well, but the Wolfpack doesn’t run the ball that well, and the Pirates are explosive. I’ll be really surprised if this game isn’t competitive all the way.

Utah (-5 ½) at UCLA: For the first half of last year, Utah clearly looked like the best team in the Big 12. But QB Cam Rising couldn’t come back from injury, and both of his backups eventually got hurt, and an excellent defense wore down from carrying the load. As a New Mexico fan, I watched every Lobo game last year, and the two things I kept saying was that if Devon Dampier stayed four years, he would leave as the best QB in school history, but that he was too good to stay there four years. Lo and behold, he followed offensive coordinator Jason Beck to Utah. The rest of the world doesn’t know it yet, but Dampier is a stud. Utah might be the most undervalued team in the country starting the season.

Oregon St. (-1 ½) over Cal: Cal QB Fernando Mendoza transferred to Indiana, so the Bears signed Ohio St. transfer Devin Brown to replace him. But true freshman Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele beat him out for the starting job. That might mean that Sagapolutele is really good, but he’s a freshman making his first start on the road. This is the second year for Oregon St. coach Trent Bray. Quarterback Maalik Murphy transferred in after doing well at Duke last season, the Beavers are deep at running back and have a good lead back in Anthony Hankerson. I think the Beavers are in better shape for Week 1 than the Bears.