College Football 2024: Explaining Conference Realignment, 12-Team Playoffs, New Rules
The 2024 college football season will look much different than previous years.
Four mega-conferences have been formed thanks to the Pac-12 falling apart over the last 12 months.
The Big Ten and SEC are viewed as the most talented leagues in the FBS because of the programs they added, but the ACC and Big 12 have the potential to be wide open with a ton of title contenders.
The top programs are not fighting for four playoff spots anymore. The playoff field expanded to 12 teams and that will give more opportunities to programs that struggled to crack the top four in the last decade.
Conference Realignment
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The Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big 12 all added members during the wide-ranging conference realignment that took place over the last 12 months.
The Big Ten brought in Washington, Oregon, UCLA and USC from the Pac-12.
The SEC's long-awaited additions of Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12 finally happened this summer.
SMU, Cal and Stanford joined the ACC in the most bizarre moves of realignment that now puts 14 teams on the eastern seaboard, one in Texas and two in California.
The Big 12 is more robust as well with the arrivals of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State.
Oregon State and Washington State remain in the remnants of the Pac-12. They both could not find a new home during the latest wave of realignment that pulled apart the Pac-12.
The MAC, Mountain West and Sun Belt look exactly the same, Conference USA added Kennesaw State and the American Athletic Conference did not replace SMU.
New Playoff Format
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The College Football Playoff expanded from four to 12 teams in 2024.
The top four seeds will be the four power-conference champions.
The winners of the Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big 12 all receive byes into the quarterfinals.
Teams seeded from No.5-11 will be at-large teams and the No. 12 seed will be the best Group of Five team.
The opening round of games featuring the No.5-versus-No.12, No. 6-versus-No.11, No. 7-versus-No.10 and No. 8-versus-No. 9 games will be played on site at the stadium of the better seed.
All of the rounds after that will be played at neutral sites, so while the top four seeds receive byes, they will not play a true home game in the playoff.
The Fiesta, Sugar, Rose and Peach Bowls will host the quarterfinals on December 31 and January 1. The Orange and Cotton Bowls host the semifinals on January 9 and 10. The National Championship Game is on January 20 in Atlanta.
The quarterfinal and semifinal sites will rotate between the New Years' Six bowl sites throughout the 12-team playoff era.
New Rules
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The biggest rules development for the 2024 season is in-helmet communication.
Coaches are able to communicate with one player, who will wear the green dot on his helmet, through one-way communication that will cut off once the play clock hits 15 seconds.
Teams can now use up 18 tables on their sideline for in-game video review. No other video is allowed on the tablets, and if anyone on the sideline uses the tablet to try to protest a call, it will be an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.
A two-minute warning is also being instituted. That will take place in the second and fourth quarters, just like it does in the NFL.
As for new penalty rules, horse collar tackles that occur inside the tackle box will be 15-yard penalties. That was not the case in previous seasons.
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