The 2024 college football season will be a season of major changes in the sport. In addition to another round of major conference realignment changes, including the Big Ten adding four teams from the Pac-12, the College Football Playoff will undergo its first expansion of the playoff era by growing from a simple four-team model to a 12-team format. History would suggest an expanded field to 12 teams should benefit a program like Penn State, which would have qualified on numerous occasions if the 12-team format was in play already, but one way-too-early projection sees the Nittany Lions continuing to miss out on the playoff fun.
247Sports shared its way-too-early look at the College Football Playoff matchups and other notable bowl games to look forward to next college football postseason. And while Penn State’s projected bowl matchup is something to be excited about, it still falls outside of the playoff mix.
The early projection from 247Sports pairs Penn State against Alabama in the Citrus Bowl, which is not one of the College Football Playoff games. Of course, that also means Alabama would miss out on the playoff, which could lead to some rocky offseason chatter for first-year head coach Kalen DeBoer in his first season in Tuscaloosa following the retirement of Nick Saban. DeBoer was hired away from Washington, which lost to Michigan in this past season’s national championship game.
The blurb about the Citrus Bowl matchup from 247Sports focussed entirely on Alabama, but it is fair to suggest Penn State will enter the 2024 season with some questions to be addressed, room to improve, and a challenging schedule in front of it. Penn State has three new coordinators in 2024 with Andy Kotelnicki from Kansas looking to give the offense a jumpstart and former Indiana head coach Tom Allen replacing the highly-successful Manny Diaz, who is now the head coach at Duke, as defensive coordinator.
Penn State’s schedule is also challenging. The Nittany Lions open the season on the road at West Virginia, a team that lost to Penn State in the 2023 opener but went on to have a 9-win season with a bowl victory. Penn State also has to travel to USC and will get home games against Ohio State and Washington.
The top six highest-ranked conference champions will receive an automatic bid in the College Football Playoff, and the top four teams from that group will receive a first-round bye (the demise of the Pac-12 could reduce the number of automatic qualifiers to five, but that is not yet official). The next six highest-ranked teams available will then be given a spot in the playoff, with the first-round games scheduled to be played on campus of the higher seed in each pairing. The remainder of the games will be played in bowl games. Ending the season in the top 12 is not necessarily a given that playoff spot will be the reward, so Penn State may need to get into the top 10 to have a shot at the playoff next fall.
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