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For the 2024 season, the most surprising teams in college football will be determined by transfers and coaching changes.

Some college football teams have clearer outlooks for the 2024 season than others. Such is always the case in a sport that features perennial roster turnover, coaching changes and widespread landscape changes, and with this offseason delivering in each of those areas to historic degrees, questions around many of the sport’s biggest programs abound. A handful of squads could compete for College Football Playoff berths while also carrying the potential for a disappointing campaign.

The emergence of first-year starting quarterbacks at powerhouses like Oklahoma and Tennessee is the source of much uncertainty, while coaching changes at Michigan and Washington threw the offseason into chaos. Those developments are the roots of both optimism and anxiety.

Not every team will perform to its expectations in 2024, for better or worse. The programs with the widest variance in possible outcomes are the ones most likely to surprise the college football world in one way or another.

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The transition from the Group of Five ranks to the power conference level is not always smooth, as the Big 12’s four newcomers in 2022 proved with their various degrees of struggles. SMU is better positioned to compete right out of the gate in the ACC, though, with its talented roster and exciting coaching staff, and the Mustangs’ schedule opens pathways to a respectable Year 1 win total. Quarterback Preston Stone could instantly be one of the league’s top quarterbacks. How the rest of the roster stacks up against power conference competition will be the difference between a tough acclimation and dark-horse league title contention.

The Big 12 could realistically account for many of the nation’s most unpredictable teams given the parity in the top half of the expanded conference. Kansas is the biggest question mark of the bunch, though, because of its quarterback situation. Jalon Daniels is among college football’s most dynamic quarterbacks when healthy, and the roster around him is on an upward trajectory that could lead to a conference title. But the dual-threat weapon has yet to start a full season and missed the majority of the 2023 season due to nagging injuries. Another prolonged absence would spell trouble for the Jayhawks in the Big 12 race.