Bottom 25 college football rankings: Wisconsin, Purdue enter while resurgent UCLA miraculously escapes

The chances of UCLA ever escaping the Bottom 25 this season looked bleak during an 0-4 start that included a pair of losses to Mountain West teams before the firing of coach DeShaun Foster. In fact, 0-12 seemed like a distinct possibility as the hapless Bruins prepared to host Penn State in Week 6.

But since Tim Skipper took over as the interim coach, the Bruins have been on rocket fuel. A win over the Nittany Lions and a 38-13 win at Michigan State in Week 7 boosted UCLA out of the Bottom 25 with room to spare. For a team that was ranked all the way down at No. 4 in the premier metric of college football futility on Sept. 30, that's quite an accomplishment.

Beating Penn State and then obliterating the Spartans effectively turned the Bruins from a bottom-feeder into a serious problem for its Big Ten opponents. As the Bruins leave the Bottom 25, two more Big Ten teams are entering this week. Purdue staved off its entry as long as it possibly could, but the Boilermakers are here now. More surprising is that Wisconsin has bottomed out so hard.

The Badgers have dropped four straight games without much of a fight and have several more significant challenges looming as third-year coach Luke Fickell slips ever closer to the point of no return. Don't be surprised if Wisconsin soon inhabits the same bottom-five level of shame that UCLA recently occupied.

This year's Bottom 25 formula has been tweaked to ensure fair representation from across the sport. Each of the Power Four leagues gets an automatic bid to the Bottom 25 each week, and a total of 10 Power Four schools must be represented.

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Chip Patterson

Bottom 25 Rankings

^ Joined Bottom 25 this week

Purdue finally arrives

Give Purdue some credit for taking longer to get here than expected. But now that the Boilermakers have arrived in the Bottom 25, we're expecting them to be repeat visitors. With games against Michigan, Ohio State and Indiana still remaining, a 2-10 or 3-9 record is quite possible. However, first-year coach Barry Odom doubled the program's win total from last season by winning his first two games. So at least there's that!

25. Arkansas (24)
24. Virginia Tech^
23. West Virginia (23)
22. Stanford^
21. Purdue^

Fickle Fickell

Wisconsin just concluded the easier half of its schedule by averaging 8.5 points during four straight losses. How bad could it get in Madison? We're about to find out, as Ohio State and Oregon are the next opponents. Indiana, Illinois, Washington and Minnesota are also left on this slate. The "worst" of that bunch is 4-2 Minnesota. Paul Chryst has got to be smirking somewhere after getting canned by the Badgers in 2022 when he had a .720 winning percentage. His replacement, Luke Fickell, is 15-17.

20. Eastern Michigan (7)
19. North Carolina (20)
18. Wisconsin^
17. South Alabama (17)
16. Arkansas State (12)

Dilfer's downfall

Celebrity hires are great for headlines and buzz, but UAB is a cautionary tale of how it can go wrong. The Blazers thought it was a good idea to hire former Super Bowl-winning quarterback Trent Dilfer straight from a high school job in Nashville, and they're now paying the price for that mistake. At least Deion Sanders was actually a sitting college coach at Jackson State when Colorado hired him. Sanders also brought stud players like Travis Hunter and Shedeuer Sanders. All Dilfer brought to UAB was embarrassment up until he was fired Sunday with a 9-21 mark midway through his third season.

15. Penn State (22)
14. Air Force (19)
13. UAB^
12. Nevada (18)
11. Northern Illinois

Texas-sized problems

Things have gotten so bad at UTEP that second-year coach Scotty Walden benched former five-star quarterback prospect Malachi Nelson this past week and started last year's QB1, Skyler Locklear, instead. It didn't have the desired effect, as the Miners lost 19-8 to a rudderless Liberty team. But there's a silver lining for CFB sickos: the outcome set up a Bottom 25 showdown for Wednesday, as UTEP will take on winless Sam Houston to decide once and for all who the worst team is in Texas.

10. Akron (9)
9. UTEP^
8. Boston College (16)
7. Charlotte (11)
6. Middle Tennessee (8)

UMassively bad

UMass entered the 2025 campaign with just eight victories over the past six seasons, but the 2025 Minutemen are setting a new program standard for futility. They have been outscored 194-32 in five games (all losses) against FBS teams. Their one game against an FCS foe? That was a 27-26 loss to Bryant, which is a bad FCS team whose only other victory to date is against Division II Bentley University. Being this bad is actually kind of impressive.

5. Georgia State (6)
4. Oklahoma State (4)
3. Oregon State (5)
2. Sam Houston (2)
1. UMass (1)