Blue-Chip Ratio 2025: These 18 college football teams can actually win the national championship

What does it take to win a national championship in college football? Culture, coaching, health, luck, but most importantly, talent. Height, weight and speed. The bounces of an oblong ball makes football unpredictable in a fun way. And it is needed, because a bigger, stronger, faster player beating on those smaller, slower and weaker than them produces boring predictable results.

But how much talent?

That’s the question I set out to answer more than a decade ago when I created the Blue-Chip Ratio.

Since its inception in 2013, the Blue-Chip Ratio has been referenced by head coaches, cited on every major college football network, and it has even made its way into EA Sports College Football. The calculation is simple, but the implications are significant. It’s one of the best tools we have for identifying which teams have the baseline level of talent required to win it all.

What is the Blue-Chip Ratio?

To win the national championship, college football teams need to sign more four- and five-star recruits than two- and three-star players over the previous four recruiting classes.

That’s it — that’s the threshold.

This has held true for every modern national champion. And while recruiting rankings aren’t perfect, they are extremely effective — especially when taken in the aggregate. And they are only getting better with the advancements in technology and data. A decade ago, for instance, it was not uncommon for about half of first-round picks to have been four- or five-stars. Now? It’s routinely 80%+. 

What the Blue-Chip Ratio is not

It is not a requirement to make the College Football Playoff. Teams with sub-50% BCRs have made the four-team field, and many made the 12-team field. But, once you’re there, the bar goes up. The difference between making the playoff and winning it is enormous.

It is not a substitute for culture, coaching, player development, health or quarterback play. All of those things matter. But none of them matter more than talent acquisition when it comes to separating the very good from the elite.

It is not a betting tool for picking games. Please don’t use this to pick Week 4 against the spread.

How has this stat held up?

Here’s the full list of modern champions and their Blue-Chip Ratios at the time:

• 2024: Ohio State (90%)
• 2023: Michigan (54%)
• 2022: Georgia (77%)
• 2021: Georgia (80%)
• 2020: Alabama (83%)
• 2019: LSU (64%)
• 2018: Clemson (61%)
• 2017: Alabama (80%)
• 2016: Clemson (52%)
• 2015: Alabama (77%)
• 2014: Ohio State (68%)
• 2013: Florida State (53%)
• 2012: Alabama (71%)
• 2011: Alabama (71%)

Ohio State — currently tied for second-best odds (+600) to win the 2025 national championship, according to FanDuel Sportsbook — captured the 2024 national title with a 90% Blue-Chip Ratio, the highest in the history of the metric. It was a strong reminder that even in an era of transfers and NIL, recruiting at an elite level remains the best path to the top.

What about transfers?

Transfers are not factored into the primary Blue-Chip Ratio. Through four years of intense portal activity, no team has won the national title by building through transfers.

Including transfer player ratings, who are, on average, lacking the upside of the elite high school recruits, makes the rankings less accurate. If you look at the incoming 2025 transfer class, it is lacking at the top. This is, according to people in the personnel space, because teams are doing a better job of holding on to their elite talents with revenue share and NIL money. It looks like the window to even attempt to build through the portal is closing. Programs I spoke with were disappointed in the quality of the portal this year.

All elite programs recruit high school talent at a high level and use the portal to patch holes. Meanwhile, teams bringing in 30 or 40 transfers are trying to either jumpstart a rebuild or salvage a coaching tenure.

That said, I will produce an alternate Blue-Chip Ratio with transfers included for your entertainment.

More on methodology

With new roster management rules now in effect, including the end of the 25 initial counter cap and more attention paid to the 85-man limit, it’s worth briefly explaining how the BCR is calculated.

• Only signed scholarship players from high school or JUCO count.
• Walk-ons don’t count, even if later placed on scholarship.
• If a player signs but never enrolls, he still counts.
• If a player signs, is released and signs elsewhere, he counts for the new school.
• JUCO-bound signees still count — the school used one of its spots.

All data is verified manually using the 247Sports Composite, which blends the major recruiting rankings.

Enough talk, show me the 2025 Blue-Chip Ratio

Tennessee and Florida State return to the fold for the first time in a while. If I had to guess, South Carolina and Ole Miss are likely to make the list grow to 20 in 2026, and no other school is remotely close to joining the club. 

A few notes …

• The SEC remains on top in raw numbers, especially now with Texas and Oklahoma in the fold. Nine teams is absurd.

• The Big Ten is right there, with a strong five. Combine that with the Big Ten’s edge in culture and retention among its top teams, and it is easy to see why the top of the Big Ten is as good as the SEC. 

• The ACC is up with three, and the Big 12 is nowhere close to fielding even one. I thought this was interesting considering the recent playoff model floated where the Big 12 and ACC are given two auto-bids each. Texas Tech could get there in three or four cycles if it continues to spend like crazy. The Big 12 likes to argue that it is the deepest league, but it has zero national title contenders. You could put together an all-star team of the top two Big 12 teams and it wouldn’t even be a title favorite. 17 teams had more players drafted than the top Big 12 team did. 

Blue-Chip Ratio and the 12-team CFP

For over a decade, the BCR has been a binary cutoff for national title contention. But, with the expanded 12-team format debuting last season, it’s fair to ask whether a team below the threshold make a deep run?

Possibly. With the right quarterback and bracket draw like the one Penn State received in 2024, a team sitting just outside the 50% mark — say, in the mid-40s — could win a couple games. But even with access more open than ever, winning three or four straight games against elite rosters is a different task.

History still says the winner will come from the BCR club.

Will someone eventually bust the model?

At some point … probably?. A team with a high-40s BCR, a transcendent quarterback and a lot of health luck will probably win it all. It almost happened with Oregon and Marcus Mariota in 2014. 

But who might it be this season? Ole Miss? South Carolina? Louisville? Utah? See, this is getting a little silly. The top 13 teams in the Vegas odds to win the national title are all BCR members.

What’s next?

The big thing I am watching is whether after the House v. NCAA settlement, talent will begin to spread out in the sport. We have never had a sport where all teams have a shot at the title, but it would be pretty cool if 30 or even 40 teams could potentially have a shot at winning the whole prize at some point in their lifetime. 

Since the advent of the BCS in 1998, 14 different programs have won the national title. An additional six have finished as the runner up.  

If that is going to expand, it will have to come via more college football teams deciding to compete for talent. That is easier to do than any time in the last few decades, because it doesn’t require moving a college campus closer to talent, or establishing tradition, it just takes outspending the competition. How many more Texas Tech types could we see? Even a few more could help even out the sport a bit. 

What would Blue-Chip Ratio look like with transfers?

Transfers are not part of the core Blue-Chip Ratio calculation. That hasn’t changed. But the portal is becoming a larger part of roster construction, and it’s worth asking: How different would the BCR look if we included transfer ratings?

Here’s the 2025 list with transfers folded in, using 247Sports’ transfer ratings and maintaining a consistent blue-chip threshold.

Few notes …

• Almost every team sees a drop. That’s expected. Most transfers, even at top programs, are not rated as blue chips. They’re role players, depth or system fits.
• Until we have several years of NFL Draft data to support that portal rankings are accurate predictors of talent, the Blue-Chip Ratio with transfers will remain a sidecar, not the main calculation.