Ready for a whole new landscape?
If you don’t pay much attention to college sports news in the offseason, you’re in for a real shocker once the 2024 college football season gets underway. The whole landscape around the NCAA has shifted, especially in football, and everything you used to know about conferences and the postseason may no longer be accurate. Let’s walk through exactly what’s happening and how it affects Boston College, too.
Conference Realignment
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2024: the year the PAC-12 dies (kind of).
After the Big Ten announced its plans to pluck off USC and UCLA in 2022, Oregon and Washington followed suit last August, causing a collapse of the entire PAC-12 conference leaving only Oregon State and Washington State remaining in the rubble. 2024-25 is the first year that all of these changes will take affect.
The Big Ten
- Adds USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington
The SEC
- Adds Texas and Oklahoma
The Big 12
- Added BYU, UCF, Cincinnati, and Houston last year
- Adds Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah this year
The ACC
- Adds Stanford, Cal, and SMU
There were additional shifts in the G5 conferences as a result of these changes also, including a scheduling agreement between the two remaining PAC-12 schools and the Mountain West.
What will really be a new feeling for Boston College fans are their match-ups with the new ACC members. The football team will play SMU down in Texas this season, followed by games against Stanford and Cal out in California in the coming years. It’s an exciting time to develop new relationships with these fanbases and schools, even if they are located across the country.
Expanded College Football Playoff
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The other major change across the sport coming this year is the introduction of a 12-team playoff. No more gripes to be had about undefeated FSU missing out on championship glory, because now everyone in the P4 has a concrete path to a national championship no matter what their schedule looks like, and G5 teams are getting a shot, too. The new format goes something like this:
- The top-5 ranked conference champions automatically earn spots in the new College Football Playoff. This will likely end up being the winners of the SEC, B1G, Big 12, ACC, and the highest ranked G5 conference champion.
- The next seven highest-ranked teams, as decided by the Playoff Selection Committee, will be invited to the CFP as at-large bids.
- The four highest-ranked conference champions will be seeded #1-4 and will receive first-round byes.
- The first round of four games will be played between seeds #5-12 at the home stadium of the higher seed. The quarterfinals and semifinals will be played as bowl games, and then the National Championship game will continue to be hosted at a neutral site at a later date.
For Boston College fans, this likely won’t be relevant at all. BC doesn’t really stand a shot at making the CFP field unless they win the ACC or at least go something like 12-1 overall. But it at least provides a viable #ThePath towards a berth on college football’s biggest stage.
Bill O’Brien at BC
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Oh yeah, Boston College has a new coaching staff! After Jeff Hafley blessed us all by leaving Chestnut Hill to become the defensive coordinator of the Green Bay Packers (thank you Jeff!), athletic director Blake James managed to pull Bill O’Brien away from Ohio State to take over the program at BC. He brings a wide breadth of experience and knowledge to the Heights that has been sorely lacking in recent years and is giving Eagles fans new hope for the future. We have yet to see what his vision for the program will truly bring and how long it will take for him to instill his values in the program, but his media appearances and work so far on the recruiting trail has us optimistic.
New Rules
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On top of all of the big structural change, there are a few rule changes coming to college football in 2024, too.
Two-Minute Warnings
Hello, NFL. In 2024, college football will begin implementing the pro-style two-minute warnings at the end of each half, providing an automatic timeout for teams to prepare for the ends of drives and for advertisers to shove more ads down our throats. Lucky us!
Remote Helmet Communication Allowed
For the first time, the NCAA is allowing players on the field to receive direct communication from their coaches in their helmets. The microphones will be cut off with 15 seconds remaining on the play clock, but it will still give QBs and their coaches a great opportunity to get on the same page and move the offense with a better flow that doesn’t require constant looks over to the sideline. Coach O’Brien talked about how he’s been preparing Thomas Castellanos for this change on a recent podcast:
Clock Running After First Downs & No Consecutive Timeouts
These changes were actually implemented last season, but it’s good to be reminded about things that change the way college football has operated for so long. For most of CFB’s history, a conversion to a first down meant that the clock stopped to allow the offense to reset, but no longer is that the case. The clock will continue to run after a first down unless the chains are moved within the final two minutes of the half. Also, college teams are no longer allowed to call timeouts consecutively within the same stoppage of play.
CFB25
Last, but certainly not least, EA’s College Football 25 hit shelves this year! A new edition of the CFB video game has been in the works for years now after it was discontinued in the early 2010s, and its release has finally come to fruition. The new game has all of the features that made it so enjoyable last time around, from recruiting to conference realignment, plus it’s been updated with new mechanics that make it a better experience than playing Madden. I highly recommend trying it out, and this is not even a sponsored post!