College Football is undeniably a timeless tradition of American culture. Unlike professional football, its college variant extends to all corners of the nation, as opposed to professional football, having thirty-two teams, and including twenty-three states in thirty cities, making it wildly more accessible than any professional sport for fans to identify with and feel passionate about a team. American football has been around since 1869 when Rutgers University and Princeton University battled it out on a muddy field in a fashion that would be unrecognizable to any modern viewer. The first rules were written in 1876 by representatives from Ivy League schools. The first conference formed twenty years later, and the first television broadcast and national ranking were absent up until nineteen thirty-nine as well as the first national champion. The first actual playoffs between out-of-conference teams didn’t occur until 2014.

College football history is long, storied, and marked by change and progress. With that being said, it has a remarkable lack of consistency in how it’s been organized throughout the years. One of the key aspects of college football is conferences. Conferences are the groups of schools in a similar region that play consistently and have their own championships distinct from the overall College Football Championship. College football has been, and in some cases was, dominated by five organizations of schools since 1996. These organizations are known as the Power Five conferences. These conferences are the Big Ten, located in the Midwest, the South East Conference located in the traditional southern states, the Atlantic Coastal Conference which is located all over the Eastern United States, the Big Twelve which is loosely located in the center of the nation, and lastly the PAC-12 which is located along the pacific states.

These conferences haven’t always been the most powerful, many different schools and conferences have been influential in college football through its nearly one-hundred-fifty-year history. A prominent example of this is the Ivy League schools which, during the inception of college football, were the only participating schools and continued to dominate into the end of the nineteenth century. Despite their early success, none of the Ivy League schools are even close to relevant on a national stage. The constantly shifting landscape of college football serves to show the impressive consistency and staying power of the Power Five conference system despite the shifting playoff format under their reign. It’s for this reason that many are taken aback by the sudden changes in college football that usher in a new era after one that encompassed the lives of newer generations of fans.

As of August 24th, 2024, the Florida State Seminoles and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets kicked off the new college football season and along with it a new era of the sport defined by the many changes to conference alignment and the post-conference playoff formatting. The biggest change in conferences is the near elimination of the PAC-12 Conference. The conference was struck down from twelve to a measly two teams after the 2023 season, with the biggest programs to abandon ship being the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, The University of Southern California, and UCLA, who all joined the Big Ten. The rest of the PAC-12 teams joined the Big Twelve. Despite losing eight-five percent of their membership the PAC-12 isn’t quite down for the count yet, Oregon State and Washington State remain and four new teams from the Mountain West Conference are joining them in 2026. The Big Twelve lost two of their highest-quality teams in Texas and Oklahoma, who both went to the already stacked South East Conference. To replace them they added six new teams both from the fragmented PAC-12 and from the lower Group of Five conferences.

These changes shake up the landscape of college football, some would say for the worse. When asked how he felt about the changes made to conferences this year senior Devon Wills said “These changes kind of make me care a little less about college football because all of the conferences that were the same way my entire life are completely different and it’s hard to keep track of” Both historic in-state rivalries around since the nineteenth century, like Oregon and Oregon State, as well as big name rivalries like Stanford and USC are now broken into separate conferences and won’t play each other bar postseason success in the foreseeable future. These changes may dilute the bulk of what makes college sports appealing in comparison to pro sports, that being the rivalries, tradition, and passion. As these historic conferences are shifted you risk losing historic rivalries, the traditional geographic conferences that promote competition between teams and provide a common link between fans, and the passion fans feel in their teams. On the other hand these new “superconferences” have a much higher level of competition among themselves and might make for many exciting regular-season college football games. For example last year Michigan was dragged by fans all over the nation for playing an easy schedule with little to no challenges until the last few weeks of the season. These complaints rang true and Michigan blew through the first three months of the season without looking back which doesn’t necessarily make for entertaining football. With all these new high-level teams added this season Michigan plays six teams that were ranked top 25 in last year’s final ranking of the teams, compared to just two last year.

Simultaneous to these changes were the changes made to the college football playoffs. The college football playoffs are interesting because they are run by a distinct organization known as the College Football Playoff Committee which both organize the playoffs and decide which teams make it. This adds a whole new fold to the already complicated relationship between schools, conferences, and the NCAA. The most recent playoff format was a four-team playoff with the participating teams being exclusively decided by the voting of the committee. The new format is more complicated with a total of twelve teams, with the four conference champions of the SEC, Big Ten, Big Twelve, and the ACC automatically moving to the second round. The last eight teams are voted on and seeded by the committee with one spot being reserved for a Group of Five school.

This new playoff format opens up the playing field to teams that were floating on the fringe of the elite as well as makes the playoffs far more accessible to Group of Five Schools. The most notable difference in this new format is the weakening of regular season results which is traditionally a staple value of college football. College Football is traditionally a sport where no more than four teams have a shot at the championship after their last games are played, which makes it so that only teams that go undefeated or some select one less team to make it, which makes the regular season grueling and unforgiving. Now, the field is opened up to two-loss teams and even three-loss teams.

While some see this as a negative it can also be seen as a positive that will bring diversity to the college football postseason and will make the playoffs longer and more exciting similar to March Madness in college basketball. Senior Ben Colburn said “I like the expanded playoffs. I’m tired of seeing the same pool of seven or eight teams playing the most important games every year.” Another important change to the playoffs is that conference winners are guaranteed spots which has been a source of controversy in the past. As recently as last year an undefeated Florida State team that won the ACC missed the playoffs against a one-loss Alabama team due to the fact that voters thought Alabama was the better team. Florida State did everything in its power to make the playoffs that year and didn’t due to voting. With the conference winners automatically making the playoffs every single school has an even shot to make the playoffs, if you win you’re in.