When determining a preseason pick for college football’s national champion, offensive lines are often the most overlooked aspect to ranking teams No. 1 through No. 124. Quarterback play and success is equally important, but developing a standout offensive line can be just as crucial.

Only in college basketball could 45 programs make coaching changes and only a handful of them be truly blockbuster. No moves at Arizona or Kentucky as in recent seasons.

The biggest name to move may be Frank Martin from Kansas State to South Carolina. The biggest vacancy was at Illinois, where the Illini struck out on their top candidates before hiring Ohio’s John Groce.

Auburn fans were getting nervous. It was National Signing Day 2012, and if you listened to talk radio, read blogs or followed Twitter around lunchtime that day, you could have been excused for thinking the sky had fallen in Auburn.

College football transfers can make an immediate impact on the conference and national title races. Need evidence? Russell Wilson's decision to transfer from NC State to Wisconsin was enough to boost the Badgers into the Rose Bowl and come within a few plays from an unbeaten regular season.

The college football coaching carousel was busy in the offseason, as 28 programs changed hands. Here’s how we rank the new hires:

1. Urban Meyer, Ohio State

The note was abrupt: “Urban, make sure the garage door is shut.” It wasn’t signed, because there was no mistaking who wrote it.

Soon after Urban Meyer was hired as Ohio State’s new football coach, he moved in with his mentor, Earle Bruce, his former boss when Meyer was a wide-eyed graduate assistant at OSU in 1986 and ’87.

As evidenced last season, new coaches can make an immediate impact on college football conference title races. Michigan's hire of Brady Hoke allowed the Wolverines to jump back into a BCS bowl, while James Franklin led Vanderbilt to its second bowl game since 1982.

Athlon ranks the new coaches from 2011 season:

Picking a college football All-American team is no easy task. Some positions are deeper than others, while it's also difficult to project how a player will perform with the losses or additions around them.

With that in mind, it's time to unveil Athlon's 2012 All-American Team.

Recruiting is the life blood of college football. And the rankings of the these prospects elicit responses both positive and negative fitting of a nickname like, say, Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate. Fans either live and die by star rankings or totally disregard Top 100 lists altogether.

In March 11, 2011, The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch columnist Bob Hunter dropped the news — Kirk Herbstreit was leaving Ohio and relocating his family to Nashville. The guy who any serious college football fan knew played quarterback at Ohio State and still contained much love for his Buckeyes found that living in Columbus was no longer bearable.