Newly engaged and legendary storm chaser Josh Pate hosts "The Josh Pate College Football Show" nightly on CBS Sports, YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Friday night the peripatetic college football sage took on a viewer question, "Who can realistically and actually win it all in 2025?"
Pate popped his paper as he is wont to do. "Ohio State, Texas, Oregon and Georgia. Mainstays, right? Perennial favorites to win this or be involved in that. Great recruiting programs. Great head coaches at these places."
"Those are at FanDuel as we speak the top four teams in the odds to win the national championship this year."
Pate conceded that this wasn't breaking news, although for Oregon fans, to have the Ducks included on a short list of mainstays and championship favorites has to be counted as progress. While that's nice, the Ducks are the only one of those usual suspects that hasn't won a title.
Pate went on to note that there are compelling reasons that this could be a year of chaos and unpredictability in the sport, starting with the fact that none of the mainstays are blessed with a returning starting quarterback, a stark fact that introduces the prospect of unusual volatility, like extreme thermal activity to the South in the twister-producing climate of bigtime college football.
""The second thing is, none of those four teams (Ohio State, Texas, Oregon and Georgia) returns over 50% production.""Josh Pate, college football podcast host
That doesn't mean he's predicting a flameout for the Ducks, or any of those programs. "For all I know," he said, "Dante Moore could just kill it at Oregon. Oregon could end up having the best version of themselves Dan Lanning's has so far."
This being April, Pate recognizes that those four favorites could wind up being merely good in 2025, opening things up for an atypical year like 2007, where in the absence of an elite team another contender emerges from the field, Tennessee, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Penn State, or Alabama for example.
"Ohio State and Oregon in any world can win the national championship," he said.
While only winning the big games on the schedule and in the playoffs can make that happen, it was nice to hear him say it. After three years of building his team around veteran transfer quarterbacks, Dan Lanning and his staff must show this year they can coach up a young team and develop their high-profile recruits. FanDuel includes them among the favorites to do so.
National Championship Odds, FanDuel:
Ohio State +600
Texas +650
Oregon +650
Georgia +700
Penn State +800
Notre Dame +1200