CBS Sports released a 100-days-out preview of the 2026 college football season, highlighting top storylines, burning questions and more.

Coming off a 7-6 season in 2025 – the second-worst record in coach Dabo Swinney’s full 17 seasons — Clemson is listed among the aforementioned “burning questions.”

Following Miami’s run to last season’s national championship game, CBS Sports wonders, “After Miami’s success, how long will it take Florida State and Clemson to bounce back?”

“A combined 14 of the 15 ACC Championships between 2011 and 2024 were won by either Clemson (9) or Florida State (5), yet the conference in 2026 very clearly runs through Miami, which has yet to win its first conference title as a league member,” CBS Sports’ Chip Patterson wrote. “It’s a strange set of circumstances in the ACC: finally having Miami running close to peak efficiency, only for it to happen as arguably the two top football brands experience differing levels of disappointment.

“For Clemson, the situation is noticeably less dire, as the program pursues the big wins needed (like the season opener at LSU) to reclaim a place at the table. But while Clemson wrestles with the discomfort of finishing outside the top 25 for the first time since 2010 after going 7-6, Florida State has just seven wins total across the last two seasons combined with Mike Norvell. The highs and lows of the last three years have been dizzying for the Seminoles, and right now it’s tough to tell if this is a program that’s just a half-step away from returning to greatness (which is how it looked in the wake of beating Alabama and last season’s strong start) or a distressed asset in need of total overhaul.”

Clemson will face both Miami and Florida State during the 2026 regular season, with the Tigers hosting the Hurricanes on Oct. 3 and then traveling to play the Seminoles in Tallahassee on Oct. 31.

As Patterson alluded to, Clemson will open the upcoming season with a highly anticipated Week 1 matchup at LSU. ESPN’s College GameDay show is heading to Baton Rouge, La., for the primetime matchup (7:30 p.m., ABC), which will mark the LSU head coaching debut for Lane Kiffin.

In its season preview, CBS Sports listed Clemson at LSU among the best non-conference game this year. CBS Sports also says “Kiffin and LSU as college football’s lightning rod for 2026” is the most prominent storyline entering the 2026 campaign.

“There are now 138 head coaches and tens of thousands of individuals represented among the players, assistants and staffers at the FBS level of college football, but there is only one Lane Kiffin,” Patterson wrote. “Perhaps we should have known that the entire sport was in the palm of his hand when the flight patterns of his private jet were being reported as though we were living a LeBron James free agency summer with Lane’s decisions between Ole Miss, Florida and LSU.

“The decision to leave the Rebels for a bitter conference rival is a touchstone event in SEC lore that will live on for decades, but it’s also a national college football story because of Lane Kiffin as a character and the proven potential for LSU’s ceiling with talent. After bemoaning the cost of buyouts as bad business, LSU gifted Kiffin with a lucrative contract and then spent millions to assemble the No. 1 transfer portal class in the country. Kiffin also poached some of the top coaches and players from Ole Miss, bringing the transactional nature of the sport to Front Street for fans who might yearn for the sport’s more relationship-based past.”

With spring practice in the books, CBS Sports recently released its post-spring rankings of every team in the FBS ahead of the 2026 college football season, and Clemson climbed to No. 26 nationally – up 28 spots from where the Tigers were in CBS Sports’ final 2025 rankings.

CBS Sports also recently named two season-defining Clemson games this year – the Sept. 25 matchup at Cal and the game vs. Miami on Oct. 3.