Joel Klatt puts Penn State No. 1 in way-too-early 2025 Top 10
Joel Klatt has Penn State as his No. 1 team in the country entering the 2025 college football season.
On Thursday, the FOX analyst broke down a way-too-early Top 10 for next season on his show. He prefaced the reveal by saying that he believes the gap between teams in the top 10 and teams in the 11-20 range is much smaller than it has been in past years, and he included teams like Florida and Illinois in that next tier.
In his top 10, he has Notre Dame, Clemson, Miami, LSU, and Michigan in the 6-10 spots. He has Oregon at No. 5, Georgia at No. 4, Ohio State at No. 3, and Texas at No. 2. Penn State, which lost to Notre Dame in the College Football Playoff semifinals this season, takes the top spot because of all the talent that plans to return to Happy Valley next fall.
“There is a clear blueprint in college football that has been now established over the last 2 years. Everything runs in cycles and right now the cycle is about veteran, experienced players. You’ve gotta have them,” Klatt said. “And it’s even more valuable when they come from your own program.”
Penn State’s opening win total for next season was set at 10.5 at FanDuel. And the under carries an implied probability of 64%.
Though the Nittany Lions are losing key pieces like Abdul Carter and Tyler Warren, quarterback Drew Allar returns alongside tailbacks Nicholas Singleton and Kaytron Allen. Klatt likened the wave of players opting to return to Penn State to what happened at Ohio State last offseason.
“Penn State has gotten better every single year for the past 3 or 4 years and James Franklin, their team, man, they had every opportunity to win that game against Notre Dame,” Klatt said. “They are knocking on the door of a national championship and now they’re bringing all of those key pieces back to their team.”
“… Are they head and shoulders the best roster in college football like maybe Ohio State was last year? No. Not quite. And I do think that this is going to be a grind because you could talk me into Penn State at 6.”
Klatt referenced Allar’s career starts (29 games). He referenced the backfield duo of Singleton and Allen, who have 5,789 career rushing yards between them. Four of the 5 starting offensive linemen are back. He also referenced the benefit of moving into Year 2 with offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki.
But if Penn State is going to contend for a title, it needs better production from its pass-catchers and it needs to sustain the level of defensive play sans Carter and sans coordinator Tom Allen.
“They have succeeded through a series of different defensive coordinators and nothing suggests that they’re going to take a step back,” Klatt said.
Klatt said Penn State has to prove it can beat a team it is “even with,” something it didn’t even do during its CFP run.
The Nittany Lions went 0-3 against AP top 5 teams this season, and they are winless against top-5 teams in their last 13 games. The last time Penn State beat a top-5 team was in 2016, when it beat Ohio State at home by 3. And it is 0-8 against the Buckeyes since.
“They’re going to have a huge chance to do that early in the year in the Big Ten opener as Oregon is going to come to town,” Klatt said.