Welcome to college football’s season of change.
Three tumultuous years filled with conference realignment, playoff expansion and various reforms come to life in 2024.
How much is new? Enough to rank the Top 25 changes you’ll see in college football this season.
1) The College Football Playoff expands from four to 12 teams.
2) The national championship game will be played Jan. 20, making this the longest season in college football history. The season starts Aug. 24 with four games involving major college teams, including Georgia Tech vs. No. 10 Florida State in Dublin, Ireland.
3) Postseason games on campus. After decades of nothing but bowl games at the highest level of Division I college football, four first-round playoff games will be hosted by the higher seeds on Dec. 19 and 20.
4) The SEC adds Texas and Oklahoma.
5) The Big Ten goes West and adds USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington to become an 18-team conference.
6) The Big 12 expands to 16 teams with the additions of Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah.
7) The ACC stretches coast-to-coast, adding SMU in Dallas and Stanford and California from the San Francisco Bay Area.
8) There is still a Pac-12, but it only has Washington State and Oregon State.
9) Washington State and Oregon State will play six games each against Mountain West schools, but they are not eligible for the conference title. Their schedules also include the annual rivalry games with Washington and Oregon, respectively, on Sept. 14.
10) Divisions are mostly a thing of the past, with the SEC and Big Ten dropping them this season. The only Bowl Subdivision conference still splitting its teams into divisions is the Sun Belt.
11) Army is joining a conference for the first time since a seven-year stint (1998-2004) in Conference USA. The Black Knights give up football independence to join rival Navy in the American Athletic Conference, but Army-Navy will still be a nonconference game played a week after league championship games.
12) After 17 seasons of unprecedented success, Nick Saban is no longer Alabama’s coach. He retired with seven national championships and was replaced by Kalen DeBoer, who left Washington after leading the Huskies to the national title game.
13) Saban is joining ESPN’s popular “College GameDay” show as an analyst.
14) Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel starts his sixth season of college football with his third different school after three years at UCF and two at Oklahoma. Transfer quarterbacks have won five of the past seven Heisman trophies, but Gabriel, who is 4,353 yards passing from breaking Case Keenum’s FBS career record (19,217) would be the first two-time transfer to win the Heisman.
15) College football has its first ninth-year player. Cam McCormick, a 26-year-old tight end at Miami, began his career at Oregon in 2016 and has had his eligibility extended multiple times because of season-ending injuries and the pandemic.
16) There is now a two-minute warning in college football at the end of the second and fourth quarters.
17) Coaches will be able to communicate with players on the field in games through radio devices in helmets. Only one player per team will be permitted on the field at a time with helmet-communication capabilities.
18) Helmet comms should lead to fewer teams relying heavily on sideline signals.
19) Players and coaches will now be permitted use computer tablets on the sideline, coaches’ boxes and locker rooms to review in-game video.
20) The number of coaches who can do hands-on, technical coaching during practice and games is now unlimited. Previously, only 10 assistant coaches were allowed.
21) Chip Kelly is an assistant coach for the first time since 2008. After leading UCLA to three straight winning seasons, he took the offensive coordinator job at No. 2 Ohio State.
22) Bobby Petrino, whose successful four-year run as Arkansas’ coach had a scandalous ending in 2012, is back in Fayetteville as the Razorbacks’ offensive coordinator.
23) Bill O’Brien takes over at Boston College, his first college head coaching job since he led Penn State (2012-13) in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal.
24) Kennesaw State is the latest school to move up from Division I’s second-tier (Championship Subdivision) to the top. The Owls join Conference USA to raise the overall total of FBS teams to 134.
25) This year marks the debut of the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl. It is the first partnership between an alcohol brand and a college bowl game.
___
This story has been corrected to show that Case Keenum has the FBS career record for yards passing, not Kevin Kolb.
___
AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/college-football
