What I’ll remember about the 2024 college football season

The 10 biggest takeaways from the past five months of the sport we all know and love

College football, for at least another seven months, is over.

In most other years, I would have said the season flew by, but considering it started with the nation being collectively stunned that Florida State lost a football game, I feel like enough time has passed.

The 2024 season was billed as one that would be like no other in college football’s 155-year history and, for the most part, that held true. The expansion of the College Football Playoff from four to 12 teams didn’t just change the postseason, but it shaped the rhythms of the regular season and how the sport was covered. One need not look further than the team that ended up winning the national championship for proof. Ohio State – with two losses, including to a previously 6-5 Michigan team – would not have made the playoff just 12 months earlier.

Beyond that, think of everything that has changed over the previous five months and how much it contrasts with our preconceived notions back in August.

Ryan Day is now an unquestioned champion (even if he still can’t beat Michigan). Notre Dame looks like a sustainable juggernaut and, in the biggest shock, is actually likeable while doing so. The aforementioned Seminoles stunk, though the schadenfreude so many of us got from it was much more predictable. Indiana (Indiana!) made the playoff while Alabama didn’t. Only one Georgia football player got busted for reckless driving.

With the championship game now nine days behind us, I wanted to put a bit of a bow on the season by focusing on what I learned from everything that just unfolded over the past few months.

I was too cynical about the 12-team playoff

Back in these digital pages nearly 14 months ago, I wrote at length about Florida State’s exclusion from the playoff and what it likely meant for the future of the soon-to-expand event. At the risk of looking like a pompous asshole by quoting myself, I wrote:

If this season and many of its predecessors showed us anything, it’s that an astonishing amount of grace, leniency and deference will be given to the programs from the sport’s most powerful and stacked conferences. So when it comes time to choose who gets those remaining seven spots, where do you think the overwhelming majority of the selections will come from?

To be fair, an undefeated major-conference champion had just been left out of the playoff and the four teams selected for it were going to be consolidated into two leagues the following season. There was reason to worry.

That dreaded future I wrote about didn’t come to fruition in the first year.

For the final at-large playoff spot, the committee selected an SMU team that didn’t even win its own conference over three SEC teams who were quite vocal about their divine right to be included. It picked an Indiana squad that got to that point without beating a squad with more than seven wins and, as we saw in the weeks that followed, there were plenty of prominent national voices who would have happily justified a Hoosiers snub.

In both cases, the committee was correct and had sound justifications for their moves.

“The way SMU played in that [ACC championship] game, losing in the last second field goal – great win by Clemson, great game – we just felt that in this particular case, SMU still had the nod at 10 above Alabama,” committee chair Warde Manuel said after the bracket was revealed. “But it's no disrespect to Alabama’s strength of schedule. It is merely looking at the entire body of work for both teams."

The fact they did it, though, was and still remains kind of stunning.

…but there’s reason to worry about it

For all the committee did right with its toughest decisions, this was still an event that still gave five of the seven at-large spots to teams from the two biggest, most influential conferences.