College football roster building was supposed to get a little easier this offseason. Instead, it somehow got way more complicated than anyone could have predicted. There was no spring transfer portal window this year, only a condensed winter window that still saw a record number of entries.
Teams were forced to address major roster needs, departures and additions in a matter of weeks. Then came the five-for-five eligibility rule. Then the federal court injunction in Colorado that opened another path for members of the 2022 recruiting class to return for an additional season.
That created another wave of roster movement just weeks before the start of the season, with some programs bringing back players who otherwise would have exhausted their eligibility. And now, apparently, we're still not done. On Wednesday, a Louisiana judge granted a temporary restraining order to 16 football players, including several who had already signed NFL contracts, clearing a potential path for them to return to college football.
For the coaches and front office personnel actually responsible for building these rosters, it's been a summer-long headache. For those of us trying to keep track of all of it, it's been inconvenient. Our process started as teams finished their 2025 seasons, when we began tracking not only returning starters but every player coming and going from all 138 FBS programs (welcome to the club, North Dakota State and Sacramento State) while keeping tabs on how much playing time each roster was gaining or losing using snap count data from TruMedia.
We published our initial round of returning production features earlier this offseason using spring rosters as the baseline. But with the eligibility rulings and other roster movement continuing well into August, we went back through all 138 rosters one more time before fall camp to provide the most up-to-date look possible. All that work produced three different ways of answering the same question: What does each FBS roster actually look like entering the 2026 season?
Returning starters are the simplest way to measure continuity, but the transfer portal has made that number less definitive than it once was. Returning snap rates tell us how much of last year's actual workload remains. And career experience shows us how much proven college football a team has on its roster, regardless of whether that experience was developed internally or imported through the transfer portal.
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