Welcome to the season of change in college football.
Three tumultuous years filled with conference realignment, playoff expansion and various reforms come to life in 2024.
What’s new? Here’s a ranking of the top 25 changes you’ll see in college football this season.
1) The College Football Playoff runs from from four to twelve teams.
2) The national championship will be played on January 20, making it the longest season in college football history. The season begins on August 24 with four games involving major college teams, including Georgia Tech against No. 10 Florida State in Dublin, Ireland.
3) On-campus postseason games. After decades of bowl games at the highest level of Division I college football, four first-round playoff games will be hosted by the top-ranked teams on Dec. 19-20.
4) The SEC adds Texas and Oklahoma.
5) The Big Ten heads west and adds USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington to become an 18-team conference.
6) Big 12 expands to 16 teams with the additions of Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah.
7) The ACC expands from coast to coast, adding SMU to 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 the Mountain West schools, but they are not eligible for conference play. Their schedules also include 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 having abandoned them this season. The only Bowl Subdivision conference that still divides its teams into divisions is the Sun Belt.
11) Army joins conference for the first time in seven years (1998-2004) in Conference USA. The Black Knights give up their football independence to join rival Navy in the American Athletic Conference, but Army-Navy will still be a non-conference game played one week after the league championship games.
12) After 17 seasons of unprecedented success, Nick Saban is no longer the coach of Alabama. 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 Joins ESPN’s Popular ‘College GameDay’ show as an analyst.
14) Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel enters 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 last seven Heisman Trophies, but Gabriel, who is 4,353 yards shy of breaking Case Keenum’s FBS career record (19,217), would be the first transfer to win the Heisman twice.
15) College football has its first ninth-grade player. Cam McCormick, a 26-year-old tight end in Miami, began his career at Oregon in 2016 and his eligibility has been extended multiple times due to 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 built into helmets. Only one player per team will be allowed on the field at a time with communication capabilities via a helmet.
18) Headset communications should allow fewer teams to rely heavily on touch signals.
19) Players and coaches will now be allowed to use tablet computers on the touchline, in the coaches’ boxes and in the changing rooms to view in-match videos.
20) The number of coaches who can provide practical and technical coaching during training and matches 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 consecutive winning seasons, he took the offensive coordinator job at No. 2 ranked Ohio State.
22) Bobby Petrino, whose four-year run as Arkansas’ coach came to a scandalous end in 2012, is returns to Fayetteville as the Razorbacks’ offensive coordinator.
23) Bill O’Brien takes over at Boston College, his first college head coaching job since leading Penn State (2012-13) in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal.
24) Kennesaw State is the latest university to move up from the second tier of Division I (Championship Subdivision) to the top tier. The Owls join Conference USA to bring the overall total of FBS teams to 134.
25) This year marks the beginning of the Snoop Dogg Arizona BowlThis is the first partnership between an alcohol brand and a college football game.
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This story has been corrected to show that Case Keenum holds the FBS career record for passing yards, not Kevin Kolb.
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AP College Football: https://apnews.com/hub/college-football
