The College Football Playoff will expand to 12 teams in 2024. Here’s what’s good and bad about the new era of the CFP.
After a decade, the College Football Playoff era is receiving its first big update. The field will be expanded from four teams to a whopping 12. How will this work and is this a good idea? Don’t worry, it’s all quite simple.
Beginning in 2024, the six highest-ranked conference champions will be given an automatic bid to the playoffs. From there, the additional six highest-ranked teams will be invited to the CFP.
The four highest-ranked teams receive byes in the first round. Teams to participate in the first round will have their game played at the campus of the higher-ranked team, or a venue of the higher-team’s choosing.
The quarterfinals will be played in four New Year’s Six bowl games, with the remaining two serving as the semifinal sites. This will all be done on a rotating basis. The winners of the semifinals move on to the national championship, which will be played at a neutral site as it is today.
There’s a whole lot of good that will come out of this new format, but, like anything, there will be some bad. Here are the pros and cons of the 12-team College Football Playoff.
It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban took home the top spot. Despite Kirby Smart winning back-to-back national championships, it wasn’t enough to unseat one of the greatest head coaches of all time. Saban has won seven national championships since 2000.
On Tuesday, they released their top Group of 5 head coach rankings. Gilmer high school coaching legend Jeff Traylor made the list as the top head coach heading into 2023.
What The Athletic Says…
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Few coaching hires anywhere have been as successful as Traylor, who in three years has produced the three best seasons in UTSA’s short history. The Roadrunners have won two consecutive Conference USA championships, with a 23-5 overall record and a 17-1 record against C-USA teams over the last two years. He also just signed the No. 1 G5 high school recruiting class in the 2023 cycle. Traylor passed on interest from Texas Tech a year ago, but the former legendary Texas high school coach is making his mark at the college level.
Traylor joined the Texas Longhorns following the 2014 season with Gilmer, he served as the special teams coordinator and tight ends coach in 2015 and 2016. He was named associate head coach at SMU and also coached running backs for one season prior to joining the Arkansas staff. UT-San Antonio would make Traylor their next head coach for the 2022 campaign. He was named Conference USA Coach of the Year in each of the last two seasons. This year he will look for his first bowl victory.
Another former Longhorn coach made the list as he returns to the collegiate landscape with Tom Herman checking in at No. 7.
What The Athletic Says…
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The former Houston and Texas coach is back in college football after two seasons spent in the NFL and in the media. Herman’s resume is still quite impressive: Four Top 25 finishes in six years as a head coach (including two top 10s), two New Year’s Six bowl wins, zero seasons with a losing overall or conference record. He takes over an FAU team moving from Conference USA to the American Athletic Conference. Herman is only this low because it’s been a few years since he was last in college football.
Herman finished his run at Texas with four-straight winning seasons and becoming the only Longhorns head coach to win a bowl game in each of his first four seasons. He never suffered a losing season but athletic director Chris Del Conte opted to go in a different direction, ultimately hiring Steve Sarkisian away from Alabama.
After being away from the college game for two years, we shall see what Herman has in store with FAU as he returns to the AAC where he coached Houston from 2015 to 2016.
These two head coaches will go head to head on Oct. 21 in Boca Raton. This conference matchup’s game time is still to be determined.
Where does the Big Ten stand nationally in comparison to all other conferences in ESPN’s final SP+ preseason projections?
The Big Ten is generally regarded as one of the nation’s premier conferences. It makes perfect sense, too. In addition to boasting some of the country’s top brands, the actual football being played on the gridiron is pretty dang good as well.
In fact, ESPN’s final SP+ preseason projections rank five Big Ten teams inside the nation’s top 17 and eight teams inside the country’s top 34. Iowa checks in No. 27 nationally according to the final SP+ ratings. Suffice it to say, the predictive model expects the league to feature plenty of the nation’s top teams once more in 2022.
On the surface, those numbers sound great for the Big Ten. How does the Big Ten stack up nationally, though? Where do all of the conferences rank according to Bill Connelly’s final SP+ preseason projections?
Here’s a worst-to-first breakdown of where each conference stands in terms of overall strength per ESPN’s final SP+ rankings.
