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, players will transfer to different schools and 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 should be better than they were in 2017. Here’s an early look at five teams SI.com thinks are primed to rise in 2018.
Florida State (2017 record: 7–6)
There should be measured expectations for what the Seminoles can achieve in 2018, which definitely was not the case last fall, when they entered Week 1 as a popular national champion pick and ranked third in both the AP Top 25 and Coaches Polls.