The 2023 college football season is weird. Sure, this season so far has had plenty of the typical weird moments, like teams struggling to count, mascots playing with fire and teams having unhinged social media reactions.
But there’s more parity this year and no clear group of super dominant teams looking like they could coast through the rest of their schedules. From the perennial College Football Playoff contenders to the undefeated teams on this list, just about every squad at some point has looked vulnerable — or at least not up to the level of expectation.
Even when it comes to the playoff, the top-4 teams with the best chances are actually changing weekly, rather than closer to monthly. It’s a weird one and, in a sport that’s king of unpredictability, somehow more unpredictable than usual too.
And as much as we wish we could, we can’t actually predict the future. But that’s not stopping us from attempting to educatedly guess which currently undefeated FBS teams will lose for the first time this season.
Currently, the Big Ten leads the way with three undefeated teams — though at least one will lose for sure in Week 8 — while the SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12 each have one undefeated team remaining. But we love the Group of Five representation here with a team apiece from the Mountain West, Sun Belt and Conference USA.
(Though there are 11 undefeated teams, we’re technically only predicting nine teams’ outcomes because Liberty and James Madison already played this week. But more on that below.)
Here are our predictions for this week’s undefeated teams. All games are on Saturday unless otherwise noted.