College football is going to look a lot different this year and in the years to come.
While NIL collectives and the transfer portal have changed college sports at warped speed, 2024 marks the beginning of mega-conferences, as well as the dawn of the new 12-team College Football Playoff.
The SEC now features 16 schools with the long-awaited additions of Texas and Oklahoma. The ACC has 17 teams with SMU, Stanford and Cal joining the league, and the Big Ten now has a whopping 18 teams — the most since the old Southern Conference (later the Southeastern Conference) had 23 teams in the early 20th century.
As far as the expanded Playoff goes, it allows for more teams to reach the postseason. In a new piece for The Athletic ($), veteran college football analyst Stewart Mandel gave out scores for how much the 12-team model impacts a team’s chances of reaching the Playoff.
Mandel explains his rankings this way:
“To assess, I’ve given all 67 power-conference schools a score between minus-5 and positive-5. The score is solely about a team’s ability to win, and does not take into account the team’s current coaching staff or roster. Scoring a 0 means the school is neither better nor worse off. A score from 1 to 5 ranges from mildly better to far better, and -1 to -5 ranges from mildly worse to … uh oh.”
So where does Clemson rank on Mandel’s scale? Pretty high.
Clemson received one of the higher grades, scoring a +3 to mark the Tigers as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the new Playoff format. Only new conference member SMU received a higher score among ACC teams; the Mustangs earned a perfect +5 grade after being welcomed into a power conference league for the first time since their infamous rise and fall in the 80s.
Mandel uses Clemson’s 2022 ACC championship team as an example of how the Tigers would benefit in the new postseason format.
“Dabo Swinney’s 2015-2020 teams had to be near-perfect to reach the four-team CFP; his 11-2 ACC title squad in 2022 would have earned a top-4 seed. His aloof portal approach doesn’t help his cause, but it doesn’t factor into this score.”
Florida State also received a +3 grade. Clemson and the ‘Noles will meet October 5 in Tallahassee in what’s widely viewed as the most anticipated showdown on the ACC schedule.
The Tigers kick off the season against Georgia at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on August 31. Kickoff is set for noon EDT. The game will be nationally televised by ABC.
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