College Football Season Preview: 2024 Brings Major Questions

As college football fans know, the 2024 season will be one of monumental change. 

The power conference has undergone its most radical shift in 30 years, and the College Football Playoff has expanded to 12 teams. For the first time ever, non-power schools will have automatic access to the national championship. 

And that’s just the beginning.

With so much change on the horizon, there’s a lot of talk among handicappers about how to attack the various college football betting markets as the sport’s major systems evolve. In some of my most popular articles, I talk about betting into the college football national championship odds and College Football Playoff odds markets.

Here, though, I want to step back from some of the more narrow online sports betting topics inside of college football and think about the season from a broader fan perspective.

We Finally Have a 12-team Playoff. Now What? 

The four-team playoff burst onto the scene in 2014, and almost immediately, fans and analysts debated whether the new format needed further tweaking. 

Hop into the way-way-back machine with me for a second. Ohio State lost a non-conference game at Virginia Tech, then barely escaped a middling Penn State squad in double-overtime in the heart of Big Ten play. Yet the Buckeyes edged out No. 5 Baylor and No. 6 TCU in the final playoff rankings, in part because the Big 12 wasn’t using a conference championship game at the time. It was the infamous extra data point. 

Was it fair to leave the Big 12 out? Probably. But the absence of deserving teams opened an early public demand for expansion. 

That demand was seemingly justified by the fact that the same Ohio State team – the No. 4 seed of the first expanded playoff – won the national championship going away. 

Historically, college football is a sport dominated by an upper crust that recruits at an elite level. Will greater playoff access for more teams change that? 

More formatting questions: How important will quality depth be in a championship format that now includes three or four games instead of two? How will the process be complicated now that games are inescapably taking place during fall semester finals? 

How long will it take for high-level NFL draft prospects to start opting out of a playoff system that is now one-third the length of the entire regular season?

Let’s also consider the fan perspective. How will the public react to the new cutline? In six months, are we going to be arguing about whether the No. 14 team in the polls is getting a raw deal?

The 2024 season will give us our first look at the new shape of things. Handicapping college football futures will be fundamentally different. 

Is There Any Stopping the New Big Ten/SEC?

College football is a haves-and-have-nots sport, so maybe super conferences were inevitable. With the SEC adding Texas and Oklahoma, and the Big Ten adding the top football programs from the former Pac-12, college football is closer to a duopoly than it’s ever been.

Go look at BetMGM’s college football odds. The top eight teams in the national championship odds table are either from the SEC or the Big Ten. (The ninth is Notre Dame, so not even a Big 12/ACC survivor.)

Have we entered a period where the best teams will almost always be from one of those two conferences? I’m skeptical that player development and the transfer portal won’t continue to be successful team-building paths in the ACC and Big 12, but I wouldn’t roll my eyes at someone who’s only betting championship futures with SEC/Big Ten teams, either. 

How Competitive Can the G5 Teams Be?

Let’s stick with the conference talk for a minute. As an alumnus of a G5 school, one of the most fascinating parts of the expanded playoff for me personally is how competitive the G5 teams will be in the new CFP.

There are a couple of elements to consider here. Historically, top G5 teams have a mixed track record of challenging top teams at the end of the year. There are great programs from the decades that have scored memorable postseason upsets – Urban Meyer’s Utes and Boise State taking down Oklahoma come to mind. UCF still claims a national championship from 2017.

However, there are also numerous examples of G5 paper tigers getting absolutely shredded in bowl games against top-10 teams. Recall, for example, the Liberty Flames getting dusted by Oregon in last year’s Fiesta Bowl. 

Even more damning: Many of the programs that built themselves into G5 powerhouses over the decades are no longer actual G5 programs. TCU, Utah, UCF, and Cincinnati are among the schools that have parlayed long-term success into power conference membership. 

That means the G5 – already at a major resource disadvantage in most cases – will be fielding playoff teams with higher stakes but a depleted pool of programs. Boise State remains relevant, but who are the next top contenders? Memphis? James Madison? Toledo?

The G5 is finally being given the chance to compete against the top of FBS, even as its own best teams are being systematically siphoned away. That conflict will be fascinating to watch this season and beyond. 

As NIL Gives Way to Profit Sharing, What Does Roster Management Look Like?

Over the last few years, fans of college sports have watched as NIL money has transformed the nature of college sports. Well-organized NIL collectives now wield real power in helping schools recruit players in high school as well as the transfer portal. 

NIL exploded into college sports in the aftermath of the O’Bannon v. NCAA and NCAA v. Alston U.S. court cases. Earlier this year, we saw a similar paradigm shift stemming from the House v. NCAA settlement – schools will be permitted to make direct payments to players in the name of revenue sharing. In many cases, the total yearly payments to a university’s athletes could be tens of millions of dollars.

The profit-sharing system won’t be in place this fall, but NCAA fans will almost certainly start to see changes that affect their teams and programs. Schools with major financial resources and strong NIL infrastructure could see their recruiting advantages begin to increase. 

This is likely the most transformative development in the history of NCAA athletics. It’s difficult to overstate how stark the coming changes could be. 

Is There Any Substance To the Deion Hype Train, Or Is It All Just Noise?

On the field, it’s hard to argue any team has been more popular and polarizing than Deion Sanders’ Colorado Buffaloes. Last year, the BetMGM online sportsbook saw thousands – maybe even millions – of Colorado bets. Early in the 2023 season, Colorado football games were drawing more bets than most NFL games. The Buffs were the book’s biggest liability in the national championship table. Seemingly everyone wanted a piece of the Colorado football odds market. 

Of course, we all know how that ended. Colorado finished dead last in the Pac-12, and the September hype shrank into November laughter. 

While some schadenfreude was probably appropriate after some wild early press conference comments, it’s also important to be fair to Sanders. Colorado was awful in 2022, and Sanders attempted to remake Colorado’s roster with the most ambitious transfer project in college football history. 

On top of that, the Pac-12 turned out to be the best conference in college football last year. Is it any wonder the Buffs struggled to earn wins in conference play?

Colorado has inserted itself back into general college football relevance by hiring Sanders. In 2024, the goal should be to show it’s closer to competing in the top half of a power conference.

Sanders’ Buffaloes will be among the most closely watched teams of the season. Whether he wins or loses, millions of fans will share some very aggressive opinions.