I'm well on my way to my goal of putting out the earliest College Football preview for the upcoming 2026 season, and hope you all enjoy it and share it with those that you hold closely to your CFB fanatical heart. I've gotten a few questions on how the site works, and thought it best to explain a few items as surely you will have similar questions when you start reading and researching teams during this long (and so far cold AF) offseason. This is more 'house meeting' type information, so I'll try and keep it short.
Everything starts with team rosters. These are difficult to put together, especially this early in the offseason. Some teams already have official 2026 rosters available, I cannot thank them enough. The rosters on this site are my best guess, and sometimes that guess can be incomplete or wrong. I've been manually removing graduates and NFL entries, while also manually adding in FCS transfers as I don't have good roster information outside of FBS teams. I build team ratings based on many metrics, but in the offseason it's more about who's on your team and who's coaching them vs. anything else. So if you see an error on a team roster, please send it to me at @PuntandRally or email admin@puntandrally.com. I recently received a message from a family member of a player at a Sun Belt school, letting me know that I was missing someone that was coming back in 2026. I haven't stopped smiling thinking about that one, a testament to the passion of CFB fans everywhere, and I'm incredibly greatful.
Team talent is based on these team rosters, and one of my goals this offseason is to build a better player ratings system to improve this metric. Right now I'm using what is available, which are recruiting and portal rankings, which don't tell the story of a player outside of when they arrived on campus. But for now it works, and it does give a decent picture of what a team is made of despite it's flaws. My power ratings in the offseason depend a lot on the team talent numbers, so they are critical to building a better preview. Schedules are being released at this point, and I'm adding in that information as it becomes available. Once I have all the schedules I can start building out record projections and a whole lot more, I'm excited to get started down that road.
The profile pages for each team contain a notes section, the 'live' portion of the page that I update with comments and thoughts throughout the offseason. I will go through each team and put notes in about what I think of them, the players, staff, the type of information I would want to know in a CFB preview magazine. This carries over into the regular season as I make notes that I find helpful information to know once we actually get to see them play and progress throughout the season. I'm trying to get better about updating these more often, but unfortunately life dictates that I can only spend so much time on CFB and this site. This a single owned/operated site that is my passion project, and that's why I humbly ask you to send me any info or corrections you can, the more information I can get my hands on quickly, the better. And while I put a ton of time into this site, diehard fans are going to know their teams much better than I ever will.
There is still a historical aspect to my ratings, how a team has played recently is helpful information. But it's also becoming less reliable is this transfer portal era, as we're seeing teams swing wildly up and down more often than in any point in CFB history. This is also an aspect of my ratings I'm attempting to improve, but we're still early in this new era and don't have a great sample size, which is always the case in a sport that plays only 12 regular season games. If a team played well in 2025 and returns a lot of their players and/or added a gaggle of good players out of the portal, they're going to have a better rating than teams that haven't performed well or lost a ton of their production. Hopefully that gives an accurate picture of the 'why' behind the data you're looking at, or in recent cases what information I'll be responding to you when you say you're favorite team is 'criminally underrated'. Honestly FSU fans, I appreciate your enthusiasm but my numbers aren't the reason your Noles aren't exactly in the best of shape these days. Cheers.
Everything starts with team rosters. These are difficult to put together, especially this early in the offseason. Some teams already have official 2026 rosters available, I cannot thank them enough. The rosters on this site are my best guess, and sometimes that guess can be incomplete or wrong. I've been manually removing graduates and NFL entries, while also manually adding in FCS transfers as I don't have good roster information outside of FBS teams. I build team ratings based on many metrics, but in the offseason it's more about who's on your team and who's coaching them vs. anything else. So if you see an error on a team roster, please send it to me at @PuntandRally or email admin@puntandrally.com. I recently received a message from a family member of a player at a Sun Belt school, letting me know that I was missing someone that was coming back in 2026. I haven't stopped smiling thinking about that one, a testament to the passion of CFB fans everywhere, and I'm incredibly greatful.
Team talent is based on these team rosters, and one of my goals this offseason is to build a better player ratings system to improve this metric. Right now I'm using what is available, which are recruiting and portal rankings, which don't tell the story of a player outside of when they arrived on campus. But for now it works, and it does give a decent picture of what a team is made of despite it's flaws. My power ratings in the offseason depend a lot on the team talent numbers, so they are critical to building a better preview. Schedules are being released at this point, and I'm adding in that information as it becomes available. Once I have all the schedules I can start building out record projections and a whole lot more, I'm excited to get started down that road.
The profile pages for each team contain a notes section, the 'live' portion of the page that I update with comments and thoughts throughout the offseason. I will go through each team and put notes in about what I think of them, the players, staff, the type of information I would want to know in a CFB preview magazine. This carries over into the regular season as I make notes that I find helpful information to know once we actually get to see them play and progress throughout the season. I'm trying to get better about updating these more often, but unfortunately life dictates that I can only spend so much time on CFB and this site. This a single owned/operated site that is my passion project, and that's why I humbly ask you to send me any info or corrections you can, the more information I can get my hands on quickly, the better. And while I put a ton of time into this site, diehard fans are going to know their teams much better than I ever will.
There is still a historical aspect to my ratings, how a team has played recently is helpful information. But it's also becoming less reliable is this transfer portal era, as we're seeing teams swing wildly up and down more often than in any point in CFB history. This is also an aspect of my ratings I'm attempting to improve, but we're still early in this new era and don't have a great sample size, which is always the case in a sport that plays only 12 regular season games. If a team played well in 2025 and returns a lot of their players and/or added a gaggle of good players out of the portal, they're going to have a better rating than teams that haven't performed well or lost a ton of their production. Hopefully that gives an accurate picture of the 'why' behind the data you're looking at, or in recent cases what information I'll be responding to you when you say you're favorite team is 'criminally underrated'. Honestly FSU fans, I appreciate your enthusiasm but my numbers aren't the reason your Noles aren't exactly in the best of shape these days. Cheers.
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦