When the new college football season begins, it will do so looking rather different from the one we said goodbye to back in January.
Nick Saban is no longer coaching at Alabama. Jim Harbaugh is no longer coaching at Michigan. Bobby Petrino is, against all odds, somehow back at Arkansas. And Chip Kelly is back to being an offensive coordinator.
Texas and Oklahoma are members of the Southeastern Conferences. The Big Ten has a western wing of USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington. The Atlantic Coast Conference now includes two programs from the Bay Area and one from Texas.
We’ve got college football’s first ninth-year senior in Miami tight end Cam McCormick. We’ll also have a two-minute warning for the first time. Offensive coordinators can now communicate directly with their quarterbacks through technology in their helmets. Coaching staffs can be bigger than ever before.
In short, everything has changed. Here’s what you need to know about everything that’s new now — and what’s to come in the years ahead:
Realignment realized
Summers used to be a relatively quiet time in the world of college football. Not so much anymore, and definitely not at all the last few years, with realignment rumors and speculation dominating offseason coverage.
All hell broke loose following a Houston Chronicle report on July 21, 2021, that said that Texas and Oklahoma were trying to join the Southeastern Conference. Nine days later, they had been formally accepted into the league. And the rest of the college athletic landscape was never quite the same.
The Big 12 moved quickly to stabilize itself by adding BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF in September 2021 to bring its membership up to 12 teams. There was also the short and ill-fated “Alliance” between the Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC … which began in response to the SEC nabbing Texas and Oklahoma and ended when the Big Ten poached USC and UCLA from its ally in the summer of 2022. That was the beginning of the end for the Pac-12 conference.
Without its flagship L.A. schools and last up in the media rights marketplace, the Pac-12 and commissioner George Kliavkoff struggled to negotiate a new media rights deal that would keep the rest of the conference intact. After a rather public courtship, Colorado announced it was departing the Pac-12 for the Big 12 on July 27, 2023. By midnight on August 5, the rest of the league had unraveled, too. Oregon and Washington were headed to the Big Ten, and Arizona, Arizona State and Utah were joining Colorado in the Big 12.
Stanford and Cal took reduced shares to join the ACC, and SMU agreed to forgo its share of media rights revenue for nine years in order to get into the conference, too. Oregon State and Washington State — colloquially referred to as the “Pac-2” — were left behind and left in a sort of limbo for the next couple of years. The Mountain West gave their football programs a life raft, partnering with the two for a one-year scheduling agreement that gives the Beavers and Cougars six additional games apiece against Mountain West teams to round out their full schedules. Most of their other sports teams will play as affiliate members of the West Coast Conference.
Realignment decisions trickled down to the Group of Five level, too, with the American Athletic Conference raiding Conference USA and C-USA backfilling those spots. The Sun Belt added a trio of C-USA teams and FCS powerhouse James Madison. The Mid-American Conference remained largely on the sidelines until early 2024 when it added FBS independent UMass to the fold.
It took tons of meetings, various presidential votes and a lot of money moving around to get to where we sit today — with an 18-team Big Ten, a 17-team ACC, a 16-team SEC and a 16-team Big 12. But we’re finally living in the world that university presidents, athletic directors and conference commissioners decided to create. All of the realignment decisions made in the past three years are now a newly realigned reality. And this will be the first fall to experience that fallout.
Some of it is awesome. We’ll have Oregon-Ohio State and Georgia-Texas as conference games! But we’ll also have teams traveling cross-country more frequently than ever before, and we’ll also have insanely complicated tiebreaking procedures, since all these leagues have done away with divisions. But it’s time to start living in this new world, instead of just hypothesizing about what it would be like.
Of course, there’s also the prickly matter of the ACC. Clemson and Florida State have both taken the conference to court to begin what they hope is a lengthy process that allows them to extract themselves from the league. So, while realignment might seem dormant for the time being as schools acclimate themselves to their new surroundings … never say never.
The 12-team CFP takes center stage
After years of negotiations, handwringing and public pressure campaigns, it’s finally here. The new 12-team College Football Playoff is months away from making its debut and crowning the first national champion of a new era. The CFP has expanded from four to 12 participants, which means more games, more rounds and more intrigue down the stretch.
Much of the selection and ranking processes will remain the same, because the selection committee always evaluated teams well beyond the top four. Now, the five conference champions ranked highest by the selection committee will receive automatic berths to the CFP. The final seven spots will go to the highest-ranked at-large teams. There is no cap on the number of spots one conference can receive, so prepare yourselves for a world in which we’re regularly seeing three SEC teams and three Big Ten teams in the same bracket … and maybe more.
Because there are now just four power conferences (the Big Ten, the SEC, the ACC and the Big 12), having five AQ spots for conference champions guarantees one spot for the Group of Five every year. The Group of 5 champion will either be seeded where it is ranked if it’s in the top 12 of the final set of rankings — or at No. 12 if it is actually ranked lower than that.
The top four seeds in the bracket all get first-round byes in the new format — and all four will be required to be conference champions. This will take some getting used to. For example, because of upsets in conference championship games in 2022, 11-2 Clemson, ranked seventh in the final CFP rankings, would have actually been the No. 3 seed under this model … ahead of TCU, Ohio State, Alabama and Tennessee. The Tigers were ranked behind all of those teams in the actual rankings that year.
Notre Dame, of course, does not play in a conference. So, the Fighting Irish are ineligible to receive a top four seed. That’s a tradeoff that Notre Dame is more than happy to make to maintain its independence while still ensuring access to the national championship. The Irish are off during conference championship weekend anyway, so they essentially get a pre-emptive bye.
One of the best parts of the new CFP is that the first-round games will be played on campus. So, the teams seeded 5-8 now get home-field advantage — and their fan bases get to create the atmospheres that surround those monster games. A few athletic directors have already begun banging the drum for quarterfinal games to be played on campus as well, but right now the quarters and semis are all scheduled to be played at bowl sites. The title game is also always played at a neutral site. This year’s champion will be crowed at Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
It is important to note that there could be future changes to the CFP model beginning with the 2026 season. That is the start of a new six-year media rights deal with ESPN, so while it’s the same CFP governance group and same media partner, it is a chance to make some tweaks. The Big Ten and SEC have expressed interest in wanting multiple AQs each year. Those two leagues will already be taking home a larger portion of the revenue generated in the new contract, and they will be able to make format changes (with input from the ACC and Big 12). So, this could be a two-year beta testing period of sorts, and we could possibly end up with a bigger bracket and/or more designated AQs in a couple of years.
A changing collegiate model
From the advent of the transfer portal to the opening of the floodgates of the NIL era, college sports has experienced historically significant changes in just the past six years alone. Athletes have never had this kind of freedom of movement without penalty, and they’ve also never before had the ability to legally pocket money while playing college sports.
A number of state attorneys general have challenged a number of individual NCAA rules to force change in the NIL and transfer eligibility space, making it difficult for the NCAA to create new restrictions and/or to enforce existing rules. And prominent lawyers have taken aim at the NCAA more broadly with federal antitrust lawsuits aimed at breaking apart the current business model that supports the collegiate athletic enterprise.
In May, both sides in the House v. NCAA class-action lawsuit formally announced terms of a landscape-altering settlement that includes $2.75 billion in back-pay damages the NCAA will owe to former Division I athletes as well as the creation of a future revenue sharing model between power-conference schools and athletes. As early as fall 2025, athletes will be able to be paid directly by their schools, if the settlement is approved by Judge Claudia Wilken.
In a letter that NCAA president Charlie Baker sent to his membership after the settlement terms were agreed upon, he stated that the NCAA losing the House case at trial could have been “financially devastating and unsustainable.” As it is, the $2.75 billion will be paid out over 10 years, largely relying on NCAA reserves. But every Division I conference will feel the financial pinch, as each league will have revenues withheld over the coming decade to help foot the bill.
If the settlement is approved, the new revenue-sharing model will work as follows: Schools will be able to opt into the model, and they can spend up to 22 percent of the average of power-conference program’s revenue on direct payments to athletes. For the first year of the settlement, that 22 percent figure projects to be about $20 million per year per school. Individual schools would determine if they wanted to opt into paying up to $20 million to their athletes, and then they would need to determine which athletes in which sports they want to pay. The cap is expected to grow slightly each year as the power conferences’ projected overall revenues increase. Administrators do yet not know exactly how Title IX will apply to the revenue-sharing model.
As part of the proposed settlement, there will be new roster limits for NCAA-sponsored sports. Baseball teams, for example, will be able to carry 34 players. But there are no scholarship caps anymore, so schools can decide to fully fund whichever sports they wish. If they want to pay for 34 baseball scholarships, they can. Administrators just have to make sure their overall scholarship allocations are Title IX-complaint. And that they are prioritizing the sports that they should, whether that’s football/men’s basketball because they’re the biggest revenue-drivers or softball because it’s a powerhouse. It’ll be up to each school’s leadership to determine how it wants to allocate its resources, a decision that becomes even more challenging if you’re taking $20 million out of your pocket to pay athletes directly in addition to everything else.
Sports could be on the chopping block. Olympic sport coaches may see salaries decrease. Perhaps facilities projects will slow down a bit as money is directed elsewhere.
While a revenue-sharing model wouldn’t impact the actual football we see played on Saturdays, it would represent a fundamental shift away from the bedrock principle of amateurism that college sports has claimed for so many years. Some would argue that that principle was eroded a long time ago, as coaches became multi-millionaires or conferences decided to expand across multiple time zones. Others would say the NIL era was the real death knell for the NCAA, its power severely weakened as athletes claimed theirs. And there might be those who won’t consider college sports fully reformed until athletes are designated as actual employees. (There are still cases related to athlete employment working their way through the courts and through the National Labor Relations Board as we speak.)
Still, there’s no denying the significance of the House settlement, both for past college athletes who will soon receive back-pay and future college athletes who will soon realize more economic power than their predecessors ever had. And what comes next is going to be fascinating, no matter what form it could take. Perhaps it’s another eventual reorganization of the top level of Division I based on which athletic departments are paying athletes and which ones aren’t, or maybe some schools will end up essentially downgrading their athletic offerings in a model that more closely resembles club sports.
There lies a great deal of uncertainty ahead. But those who love college sports know the best way forward is taking step after step, not necessarily knowing where you’ll end up but trusting that it’s where you’re supposed to go. Indeed, this will be a season unlike any other in the history of college football, where geography no longer applies to conferences, more teams than ever before will have a shot at the national championship, and the future is guaranteed to shift.
After all, change is the only constant.