What I’m looking forward to from the 2024 college football season
After a long, grueling wait, our beloved sport is back
Though it technically began last weekend with a set of games that stretched from Ireland to Hawaii, the 2024 college football season kicks off in earnest this week.
Even more than baseball and all of its opening day symbolism, the start of college football represents the arrival of better days. Hot, sticky and unbearable weather is giving way to the gentle crispness of fall. Leaves will soon be changing colors. Most of all, the doldrums of the sports calendar are over and, at long last, we’re freed from the tyrannical monopoly of baseball (though thank whatever higher power you worship for the Olympics.)
For all the excitement it brings, college football’s reemergence can feel a bit overwhelming at times, with 134 teams and their perpetually in-flux rosters. Believe me, I feel it, too.
Over the past several weeks, there has been no shortage of fantastic outlets from across the country churning out pieces about the biggest storylines and boldest predictions for the season. Instead, I want to go over some of my personal curiosities heading into what should be an enthralling next four months. Some of these are oft-discussed topics affecting the biggest names in the sport, but I hope that some of these other subjects that pique my interest reflect the broad, diverse and reliably wacky nature of this beautifully odd sport.
Having said all of that, here’s what I’m looking forward to most in the 2024 college football season:
On-campus playoff games
There’s likely no development more consequential in the sport heading into this season than the expanded College Football Playoff, which has tripled in size from last year and will now feature 12 teams. I, too, am excited to see what the first year of an expanded playoff brings, even if I remain skeptical about how much it will mitigate what’s increasingly becoming a two-conference sport.
To me, though, the best and maybe most overlooked feature of this new playoff isn’t how many teams it will have, but where some of the games will be – on campus. The first round of the playoff will take place at a site of choice for the higher-ranked team, meaning those four matchups (the top four seeds receive byes to the quarterfinals), will take place in their home stadiums. It’s tantalizing enough in theory, but potentially more thrilling in practice. According to USA Today’s preseason projections, the four on-campus playoff games this season would be…
Memphis at Alabama
NC State at Oregon
Oklahoma at Notre Dame
Penn State at Texas
My goodness.
For decades, college football fans have been conditioned to watching the sport’s biggest postseason games taking place at neutral sites that, even if they’re sold out, often feel a bit staid. To experience the sport’s true essence, you have to see it on campus, where the energy and passion is palpable even on television. It’s exhilarating enough for a big-time regular season game. For a win-or-go-home playoff game, it will be something this sport hasn’t seen in generations.
The Ohio State crucible
There’s a fascinating duality to Ryan Day. On paper, and in the way he’s often discussed in the broader college football media, the Ohio State coach is one of the best in the country, with a 56-8 record, three playoff appearances and two Big Ten championships in his time with the Buckeyes.
If you ask a die-hard Ohio State fan about him, you’re likely to get a much different assessment. For all the games Day has won, he’s lost a majority of the most important matchups of his tenure. Since taking over as the full-time head coach in 2019, Day is 2-5 against top-five teams. More damningly, he’s 2-3 against archrival Michigan and last season, he became the first Ohio State coach in nearly 30 years to lose to the hated Wolverines three years in a row. Because of those high-profile stumbles, there’s a sizable portion of the fan base that wants him gone or is at the very least inching in that direction.
Using their hefty NIL war chest, the Buckeyes added a handful of major pieces to give them perhaps the most talented roster in the sport. What they do with it – that is, whether they can win a national title or make a sufficiently deep playoff run – could shape Day’s future in Columbus. A coach who has won 87.5% of his games being on the hot seat may sound ludicrous, but this is college football. Logic doesn’t and perhaps shouldn’t always have a place here.
Can post-Saban Alabama stay sane?
I wrote about this more extensively back in January after Nick Saban retired, but there’s an entire generation of college football fans that doesn’t know how truly unhinged and volatile Alabama is when it’s not annually in the mix for the national championship.
For much of his 17-year tenure, Saban quelled that discontent, losing more than two games in a season just once from 2008-23. Miraculously, he made a powder keg appear stable. Kalen DeBoer’s an excellent coach who has won everywhere he has ever gone, with a 104-12 career record to his name, so barring some truly unforeseen circumstances, it’s highly unlikely the Crimson Tide falls off to the level it did under Mike DuBose or Mike Shula.
But if a relative outsider with no SEC coaching experience and no hard-earned goodwill with an impatient fan base dares to lose more than twice in a season or misses out on the 12-team playoff, things could get ugly at a place where Bill Curry allegedly had a brick thrown through his office window during a season in which he went 9-3.
A rivalry reborn
It doesn’t require any sort of deep, intense contemplation to make a list of the myriad rivalries conference realignment has ruined over the past 20 years – Oklahoma-Nebraska, Kansas-Missouri, Pitt-West Virginia and many more.
With Texas’ move to the SEC this season, a rivalry that realignment once killed has now been revived by those same forces. The Longhorns’ addition to the SEC not only gives the sport’s preeminent conference another one of its preeminent brands, but it reunites them with bitter longtime rival Texas A&M, which it hasn’t played since 2011, the last year both programs were in the Big 12. In that final matchup, future NFL All-Pro kicker Justin Tucker made a go-ahead, 40-yard field goal as time expired to give Texas the win.
At least part of the stated rationale for Texas A&M’s move to the SEC was to escape Texas’ immense shadow and be the only SEC program from the state. Now, the Longhorns are joining them, with the 13 years in between allowing resentment and acrimony to fester between the two biggest schools from what might be the nation’s foremost football factory of a state.
Circle Nov. 30 on your calendar, folks.
Just how far can Travis Hunter go?
For all of his otherworldly athleticism and skill, Travis Hunter is very much a throwback player. The Colorado star is one of the rare FBS football players who logs snaps on both offense and defense – and plays both positions exceptionally well. As a wide receiver last season, he had 57 catches for 721 yards and five touchdowns. At cornerback, the position many expect him to play at the NFL level, he had 31 tackles, three interceptions and five pass break-ups. He even pitched in on special teams, too.
Those numbers aren’t even the most interesting ones when it comes to the No. 1 overall recruit from the 2022 class. Last season, he played 1,102 snaps (475 on offense, 631 on defense, 32 on special teams), the highest mark of any player in the country and one he reached despite missing 3.5 games with an injury. Colorado as a team played 1,700 snaps last season, meaning Hunter, despite being sidelined for one-quarter of the 2023 slate, played 64.8% of the Buffs’ total snaps. And, to make the feat even more impressive, he did all of that while playing a majority of the season at altitude.
If his 2024 debut is any indication of what the rest of this season has in store, Hunter might be even more extraordinary than he was in his first year in Boulder. In Colorado’s 31-26 win over North Dakota State, he had seven receptions for 132 yards and two touchdowns, as well as three tackles.
Hunter’s team likely won’t have the wins to earn him the Heisman Trophy – which is an indictment of the award, if anything – but make no mistake: this may very well be the best player in the country and the type of athlete we only see in the sport every so often.
Weird-ass conference matchups
Once the news is broken that a particular school is joining a new conference, there are several steps in which the move officially begins to feel real. There are the maps showing a league’s geographic footprint, which suddenly include a new, previously unfamiliar state. There’s the conference branding that now appears on jerseys and fields.
For me, though, the reality of it doesn’t start to sink in until I see some grotesquely unusual matchups. Texas playing Georgia seems like a high-profile battle that just now happens to be a league game. Same for Oregon and Ohio State.
What I’m talking about, though, are the games where you see a matchup listed and openly wonder why the hell it’s being played before coming to the realization that “Oh, these teams are in the same league now.” While those aforementioned marquee game may be the strongest argument in favor of the new Big Ten, SEC or ACC – more meetings between more top powerhouses – these games are the ones that reinforce how patently absurd it is that the Big Ten now stretches from New Jersey to Los Angeles and the Atlantic Coast Conference now has two schools on the Pacific Coast.
The games this season I think best embody this category?
USC at Maryland
Cal at Wake Forest
Stanford at Syracuse
Oregon at Purdue
Washington at Rutgers
The race for the Big 12 title
Speaking of inexplicable geographic absurdities, the Big 12, once a beautiful marriage between the Plains states of the Big Eight and the Texas schools fleeing the disintegrating Southwest Conference, now spans across three time zones and features a number of schools that share seemingly nothing in common beyond the patch now stitched to their jerseys.
And guess what? It should be a hell of a lot of fun, not only this season, but for the foreseeable future. While the SEC (Georgia, Texas, Alabama), the Big Ten (Ohio State, Oregon) and ACC (Florida State, Clemson, Miami) all have clear-cut favorites, parity is the defining theme of the Big 12, which has five teams ranked between No. 12 and No. 22 in the preseason Associated Press poll. It truly feels like it’s anyone’s league, with the winner earning an automatic berth in the quarterfinals of the playoffs.
Steven Godfrey from the excellent podcast “Split Zone Duo” has brilliantly described the league as a 3 a.m. Vegas buffet, with mismatched parts inexplicably placed next to one another. But for what it may lack in aesthetic beauty or nutritional sense, sometimes life brings you to a point where a plate with tempura shrimp and chocolate pudding sounds mighty tasty.
Year Two of Matt Rhule
Part of the appeal of Matt Rhule for Nebraska was hiring a coach who has shown he can build a program from scratch at different levels and in drastically different pockets of the country. If a man can turn Temple into a top-25 team and then revive Baylor in the aftermath of one of the biggest scandals in college football history, he clearly knows what he’s doing.
At each of those two previous stops, his programs have had similar trajectories. The first year was forgettable, with Temple going 2-10 and Baylor 1-11. The following season, there was significant improvement – Temple went 6-6, Baylor 7-6 – before each program won at least 10 games in Year Three. After a 5-7 debut with the Huskers in which they were a capable quarterback away from being much better, 2024 could be a long awaited breakthrough.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous newsletter, if Nebraska can’t return to anything vaguely close to its former glory under decorated native son Scott Frost and undeniably successful program-builder Rhule, it’s fair to wonder if it ever will.
The Two-Pac
Believe it or not, there is still a Pac-12 this year, even if it’s more of a functioning carcass than a viable league that can send its conference champion to the playoff. The Conference of Champions is down to just two programs, Oregon State and Washington State, after its 10 former compatriots fled for seemingly greener pastures.
Two things fascinate me with this arrangement.
For one, I want to see how the Beavers and Cougars do with what’s effectively a Mountain West schedule, with the former playing seven MWC teams and the latter eight (they also face off against each other.) Without any of the Power Four conferences clamoring for their inclusion, this will likely be Oregon State and Washington State’s new reality, whether they simply join the MWC or most of its membership comes under the Pac-12 umbrella in some kind of reverse merger. While it won’t make up for the massive financial losses they suffered by being left behind, it could still be a fun set-up that includes a (gasp!) regional schedule.
Beyond that, though, this season will offer a glimpse at how good these programs might be without a power conference affiliation. Both the Beavers and Cougars were ranked at various points last season in the Pac-12’s swan song. While Wazzu should still be competitive, Oregon State was decimated after coach Jonathan Smith left for Michigan State and a mass player exodus followed him. A program that peaked at No. 10 in the major polls last season could experience a swift and disheartening fall on top of the painful, lasting wounds it has already suffered.
The perennial doormat with the swaggering coach
A healthy chunk of my family are Indiana graduates, but even someone with only a passing familiarity with the school’s football program knows enough about the Hoosiers to know they stink and have for much of their existence. Over the offseason, they worked to remedy that, forking over $15.5 million in buyout money to fire coach Tom Allen and bring over Curt Cignetti from James Madison to replace him.
Not only does Cignetti have a winning pedigree – under his watch, the Dukes went an astonishing 19-5 in their first two years as an FBS member – but he carries himself in an unapologetically confident way that, for a first-year coach at one of the Big Ten’s worst programs, is a little unnerving.
At his introductory press conference last December, he was asked how he might sell recruits on Indiana. “I win. Google me,” he answered. At Big Ten media days this summer, he said he defines success at Indiana as “being the best” in what will be, at worst, college football’s second-best conference most years. When asked at the same event if he’s excited to go to the Rose Bowl when the Hoosiers play UCLA on Sept. 14, he gave another blunt, eyebrow-raising response.
“For all the wrong reasons,” Cignetti said. “We’re just going to an old stadium to kick somebody’s ass.”
Given his past accomplishments, I thought Cignetti was an outstanding hire for a program at a basketball school that desperately needs a shot in the arm. After his first nine months on the job, I’m even more convinced of that.
Is Clemson cooked?
The funny thing about the fall of a dynasty is that there’s never really a glaringly obvious warning that it’s about to occur. It just sort of happens over time until what was once a mighty force is unrecognizable from its former glory.
Clemson’s rise in the 2010s has been well-documented. The program that seemed destined to get tantalizingly close to glory only to trip up in the most hilarious way possible became a national power that competed against and regularly beat programs like Alabama and Ohio State with much more history and many more built-in advantages. In nine seasons from 2012-20, the Tigers never won fewer than 10 games and lost more than two games just once. Most notably, they made the playoff six years in a row, from 2015-20, and won their first national championships since 1981, doing so in 2016 and 2018. They managed those feats in part because of having future NFL standouts at quarterback. For all but one year from 2014-20, they either DeShaun Watson or Trevor Lawrence was under center.
Without a prodigious talent at the game’s most important position, Clemson has taken a step back the past three years, a stretch in which it went 10-3 in 2021, 11-3 in 2022 and 9-4 in 2023. The nine wins last season were its fewest in 13 years. That dip has happened as coach Dabo Swinney has appeared increasingly unsuited to vie for titles in the modern age of the sport, with a dismissive attitude toward players getting paid and doing little of anything to bolster his roster through the transfer portal.
The Tigers’ 30-10 record over the past three seasons is still a mark the overwhelming majority of FBS programs would crawl over broken glass to reach, but in each season, they were far from the bona fide championship contender they once were. Perhaps that changes with a 12-team playoff, but it’s just as likely that Swinney’s program fails to get back to the lofty perch it once enjoyed.
Northwestern’s makeshift football stadium
Northwestern football’s longtime home, Ryan Field, was fully demolished back in April. In its place and on the same site of the recently departed 98-year-old venue will be a sparking $800 million stadium. Until that’s completed in advance of the 2026 season, though, the Wildcats will need a place to play.
For its interim home, the university had to get creative. It built a temporary structure around its on-campus soccer/lacrosse stadium after enlisting the help of a company that constructs temporary seating and venues for Formula 1 races and golf tournaments. The project resulted in a makeshift 15,000-seat venue that, while small compared to its Big Ten peers, looks really cool, particularly with the stadium hugging up against the shore of Lake Michigan.
Right now, it looks as though Northwestern has gotten as desirable of an outcome as it could have gotten from a really tricky situation, though the picturesque lakeside setting may have some hilarious consequences beyond unfathomably cold games in the final weeks of the season. In his superb Extra Points newsletter, Matt Brown noted that between the stadium’s proximity to the water and the speeds winds can reach in that area, it’s quite possible a punt could end up in Lake Michigan at some point this season.
Bobby Petrino’s awkward Arkansas return
Twelve years after being fired by the university for hiring his mistress for a taxpayer-funded job within the Razorbacks football program and intentionally deceiving his bosses about being in a motorcycle wreck with her, Bobby Petrino is back at Arkansas.
Petrino will be the Razorbacks’ offensive coordinator. If their season goes as many expect it to – the Hogs were picked 14th in the 16-team SEC in the league’s preseason poll – and Sam Pittman is fired during the season, there’s a very realistic chance Petrino replaces him on an interim basis (and maybe, just maybe longer than that.)
It’s as surreal of a reunion as I could have imagined in the sport. Sadly, though, Petrino didn’t show up to his introductory press conference last year in a neck brace.
(Photos: USA Today, Associated Press)