It feels like an era came to an end on Monday night with the Michigan Wolverines’ 34-13 win over the Washington Huskies in the national championship game.
No longer will we have a four-team College Football Playoff. No longer will we have five power conferences dominating the landscape. Going forward, we have the 12-team playoff. Thanks to conference realignment, the Power Five has been whittled to essentially a Power Two: the SEC and the Big Ten. The ACC and Big 12 are working to keep pace.
It’s fair to say the 2024 college season will be the first of a new era. How long that era will last is to be determined, but the landscape will look far different this coming season.
For the purpose of this article, we want to look at the first year of the new expanded playoff, and try to project which teams we might see involved. At the moment, the format for the playoff is in question. Previously, the six highest-ranked conference champions would get in as automatic qualifiers, followed by the next six highest-ranked teams. That may change, now that there are no longer five power conferences, and it’s going to hard to justify giving an automatic qualifying spot to the winner of the Pac-12, which is down to two schools.
To work around that for the time being, though, we went forward using the 5-and-7 model, assuming an automatic qualifying spot would go to the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, the highest-ranked Group of Five conference champion. From there, the remaining seven teams would be decided by the rankings.
Here are the 12 teams I predict will make it into the inaugural expanded College Football Playoff.