Dawg Sports Wants To Know: Who Is College Football 2026’s Biggest Villain?
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Every good drama needs an antagonist. Sitcoms need a rival, your favorite Netflix drama needs a schemer, and college football, the closest thing American sports has to a soap opera, needs villains who make the heroes worth rooting for. The 2026 season has no shortage of candidates. Here are the four programs and figures most likely to play the bad guy this fall.
Lane Kiffin and LSU
No storyline captures villainy quite like a betrayal, and Kiffin delivered one for the ages this offseason. He left Ole Miss for LSU in the middle of the Rebels’ first ever College Football Playoff appearance, taking a chunk of his staff with him on the way out the door. In true Lane Kiffin fashion, he made certain that he was the main character of the whole drama. Ole Miss fans were left to finish the playoff run without the coach who built it, and now they get to watch him walk into Vaught-Hemingway Stadium on September 19th wearing purple and gold.
That is the kind of plot twist writers rooms dream up, and it is real. LSU enters the year with (perhaps unreasonable) championship expectations to match the drama. That means Kiffin cannot simply be a villain, he has to be a successful one. If the Tigers stumble (say, out of the gate against Clemson) , every doubt about his timing and his motives will follow him into Baton Rouge hot yoga studios for years. If they win, Ole Miss fans will have to live with the fact that the man who left them mid-heartbreak got the last laugh. Either way, that rivalry game is now the most personal grudge match on the schedule.
Arch Manning and Texas
Texas enters 2026 loaded with talent around Arch Manning, yet still chasing the redemption story after a 9-3 season that fell short of the playoff. A roster that talented, surrounded by that much hype, and still hungry for revenge against Ohio State has all the makings of a team that plays with a chip on its shoulder. That’s great if you win. But as we discussed a few weeks ago, if you’re Steve Sarkisian at some point you have to turn being a gridiron genius into an actual championship, or the knives come out.
Arch Manning is going to need to win three Heisman Trophies this season to get back on track with the expectations when he arrived in Austin. You can literally feel the urgency oozing off the digital page this summer as college football writers who hailed him as the golden boy are pushing the Arch redemption arc coming into 2026. This is really his year guys! Why aren’t the rest of you cheering him on?!?!?
Curt Cignetti and Indiana
Indiana, meanwhile, is the reigning champion trying to prove last year was not a fluke. Nothing turns a feel good underdog story into a villain faster than success. The Hoosiers spent years as an afterthought, and now they are the team everyone else is gunning for. If Indiana keeps winning, they stop being college football’s Cinderella and start becoming the program everyone quietly hopes gets knocked down a peg.
Cignetti hasn’t endeared himself to opposing fans with his brash offseason comments about the SEC and other programs. Cignetti is currently the charming oddball of college football coaches. But you only get to be the oddball main character for so long on this show (see Miles, Les). Cignetti’s “Google me” schtick could easily go stale this season.
Notre Dame
The Fighting Irish could probably fill one of these slots every season. They’re the team everyone in college football loves to hate, for reasons universal and uniquely personal.
They didn’t help their popularity outside South Bend by taking their little ball and going home last year, bowing out of bowl season because they weren’t selected for the playoff. With a Charmin-soft 2026 schedule the Fighting Irish will almost certainly be back in the hunt for the playoff this season. But fans across America would cheer if they managed to Notre Dame this thing up again.
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