Commentary: College football has a different look in 2024

The tectonic plates of college football have shifted and an earthquake of change will begin to shake up the game when the 2024 season begins in earnest Thursday with 21 major college games followed by 74 more over the following four days.

A 12-team playoff will determine the national champion.

It sounds like fun. The champions of the major Power 4 conferences, plus seven at-large teams and the top Group of 5 team (non-Power 4) will make up the postseason party.

The first four games between No. 5 through No. 12 seeds will be on campus sites beginning Dec. 20. The quarterfinals and semifinals will be at traditional bowl sites. The championship game, set for Jan. 20 in Atlanta, will mark the latest end to a regular season.

So be it. Fans have been begging for some kind of NFL-style playoff for about a half-century or so, give or take a decade. The suits that run college athletics have been resistant to change because they were paid to be resistant to change.

That is, until the billions in TV money showed up. Once the money was on the table, everything changed. Everyone’s rich now except for the poor saps who occupy the bleachers and help pay the freight.

Once the land of amateurism and an academic scholarship, players for blueblood programs now pull down six figures. Some of the top quarterbacks have two commas in their compensation. A couple of the years in the making, it all comes under the heading of Name, Image and Likeness, or NIL. It’s a fancy-sounding word that just means the courts have ruled players can get paid and no limit to how much.

So now Ohio State can have a reported payroll north of $20 million and Texas can park Lamborghinis strategically around the athletic complex with a wink-wink during a recruiting weekend. With players able to now transfer at the drop of a helmet, it’s a financial feeding frenzy with no guardrails. It is the Wild, Wild West and may the best checkbook win.

Players transfer for more money and, this just in, so do universities. Maybe you heard, but the Pac-12 is no more. Oregon, Washington, USC and UCLA are now in the Big 10 – which is 18 teams – and stretches from the West Coast to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.

Utah, Colorado, Arizona and Arizona State are now among 16 teams in the Big 12 that stretches from West Virginia to Utah, and Florida to Colorado. Stanford and Cal, which surround the Pacific Ocean, are now part of the Atlantic Coast Conference. You know, the Atlantic Coast, some 3,000 miles away.

Texas and Oklahoma started the conference realignment musical chairs when they accepted offers to join the Southeastern Conference back in July 2021, which seems like about 20 years ago. It’s official now. The dog-eat-dog SEC now has 16 teams, and I’ve done the math. Not every good program is going to finish 9-3.

While tradition and geography have taken a beating with conference realignment, we’re about to get some tasty regular-season conference matchups that never would have been possible before: Oregon-Ohio State, Oklahoma-LSU, USC-Penn State, Texas-Georgia, Michigan-Oregon, Oklahoma-Alabama, and USC-Michigan, among others.

Yes, please.

And in this expanded playoff era of 12 rather than four, more teams will be in the hunt in November, and more games with more impact will highlight the late schedule.

In all this change, Texas Tech may be as well-positioned as the Red Raiders have ever been. Really, all of the Big 12 teams are. They are a conference without bluebloods, and that’s good for Tech, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, Iowa State, West Virginia, TCU, Baylor and the other nine teams.

The playing field is now level. They no longer have to compete under the shadow of the money-machine and unlimited resources of Texas, nor the tradition and legacy of Oklahoma. The road to an automatic bid by winning the Big 12 title has a couple of sizable mountains removed.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It just means it’s easier.

Looking at NIL, Tech early on paved the way in the Big 12. The Matador Club was led by Canyon native and energy developer Cody Campbell, former Tech lineman and current Tech regent. Since then, others have caught up, perhaps surpassed. But there’s no reason Tech shouldn’t still be among the top schools in doling out financial incentives.

To put another way, if not in this window of the next five years or so, then when? When will it be better?

The Red Raiders are rarely terrible, but rarely good. The last time they bottomed out with three wins was 1983. But the last time they won eight in the regular season was 2009. Tech’s history is in the middle.

To break out of that, whether this year or soon, would be another change in college football. The Raiders have no reason not to.

Jon Mark Beilue writes about sports for The Eastern New Mexico News.