Three SEC win totals you should absolutely pounce on before the 2026 college football season begins
With the conclusion of SEC Media Days, we now officially begin the mad dash toward the opening of the college football season.
It might seem like this offseason has moved at a snail's pace, but speaking from experience, things really start to pick up after Media Days and before you know it, you're knee-deep in the regular season.
Before we reach that point, though, we have some predictions to make, and there's no better to start than to look at some of my favorite SEC win totals heading into the 2026 season.
Here are three juicy win totals for a trio of SEC squads that I absolutely love as we hurtle towards the start of my favorite time of the year.
If there was ever going to be a year that Texas and head coach Steve Sarkisian put it all together, it would be 2026.
That alone should be enough to hammer the over on this one, since nine wins almost certainly would leave the Longhorns' College Football Playoff hopes in limbo, but there's more to it than that.
This is one of the most talented rosters in the country, cultivated through multiple top-five recruiting classes over the past few cycles and supplemented by the third-ranked portal class heading into the season.
The pieces are there, but what puts Texas over the top is having another year of Arch Manning.
The redshirt junior signal caller sputtered to start the first half of 2025, but by November, Manning was one of the best quarterbacks in the country and should carry that over into this year.
The Horns play a pretty tough schedule in 2026, but a week two showdown against Ohio State should tell us a lot.
If Texas handles the Buckeyes at home, the over will almost assuredly hit.
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Staying in the Lone Star State, let's travel due east to College Station.
If this were two or three years ago, I would have fallen all over myself to smash the under, considering it was almost a meme for the Aggies to finish 8-4 following any given season.
That seems to have changed since head coach Mike Elko got to town.
In just his second year, Elko was able to guide the Aggies to an 11-win season and a Playoff berth. Now he was the luxury of a veteran signal caller returning in Marcel Reed, along with two stellar wide receivers in Mario Craver and incoming transfer Isaiah Horton.
Texas A&M also ranks top-20 nationally in returning production on defense, and I trust any Elko coached team to look really solid on that side of the ball.
The Aggies will be tested a bunch on the road this season, particularly in games against Oklahoma and Alabama, but I trust the steady hand of third-year starter Reed and a veteran team to be the deciding factor.
Nine wins feels more than doable here. Take over.
If you've been paying attention to anything I've written in the past six months, you know how high I am on the LSU Tigers this coming season and beyond.
For starters, they went out and hired Lane Kiffin as their head coach, who was fresh a historic run of leading the Ole Miss Rebels to their first ever College Football Playoff appearance.
Kiffin's staff is also noteworthy, retaining Tigers' defensive coordinator Blake Baker and bringing Charlie Weis Jr. over from Oxford as his OC.
In addition to a dynamite coaching staff, LSU brought in the number one transfer portal class, featuring the top-ranked quarterback (Sam Leavitt), offensive tackle (Jordan Seaton), and edge rusher (Princewill Umanmielen).
The hope in Baton Rouge is that the marriage of elite (and expensive) talent and a stellar coaching staff will bear fruit in year one, so anything less than a CFP appearance will be seen as a colossal failure, both locally and nationally.
Eight wins certainly won't be accepted by any of the Tiger faithful, so it almost feels like a given that the baseline for Kiffin and co. is set at 9-3.
With the September matchups against Clemson and Ole Miss, we should know very early on what this team is made of.
If the Tigers start 4-0 in the first month of the season, I'll be feeling pretty good about the win total, though they certainly won't be out of the woods by any stretch. But 2–2 or worse, and it might be time to cash out before the calendar flips to October.