Eight weeks into the 2024 college football season, clarity is still hard to come by.
Who will win the Heisman Trophy? Who will make the College Football Playoff? The candidates pool for both has shrunk, but it still feels as wide open as it has in a long time, a credit to the new 12-team CFP format keeping more teams in the hunt than ever before.
Where we lack clarity on who will win college football’s most important trophies, we have lucidity on the ones that expected to be in those mixes but will fall far short. More than midway through the season, these are the 10 programs that have disappointed the most so far.
Auburn (2-5)
In Year 2 of the Hugh Freeze regime, Auburn was supposed to take a leap into the eight or nine win territory. Auburn heavily invested in acquiring top position players, believing with the right surrounding cast, quarterback Payton Thorne would return to the version that guided Michigan State to a 11-2 record in 2021. Instead, Auburn has regressed, TV cameras keep showing Thorne and Freeze bickering at each other on the sideline and the Tigers are all but assured of missing a bowl game. Like another team on this list, Auburn has displayed an incredible ability to blow games it should have won. It all builds to Freeze having a worse record (8-12) than his predecessor Bryan Harsin (9-11) had through 20 games. Harsin, of course, was fired after his 21st game.
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