Between now and the start of the 2018 season, teams will finalize their recruiting classes on National Signing Day, go through spring practice and meet for fall camp. In the meantime, schools will have to adjust as some players transfer and others suffer serious injuries—and don’t rule out the possibility of more head coaching changes.
Those developments could scramble the national landscape over the next seven months, but it’s still possible to identify some teams that seem likely to backslide from their standout performance in 2017. To be clear, we are not predicting that the five squads below will tank, but explaining why they could be worse in 2018 than they were the previous season.