Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1514597
C ollege football as we have known it is over. It ended at precisely 11:10 p.m. EST on Jan. 8, when the final second ticked off the clock in Michigan's 34-13 victory over Wash- ington in the championship game of the College Football Playoff. That moment marked the conclusion of the 2023 sea- son, and the end of the season was also the end of an era. When the 2024 season begins, the sport's entire landscape will have un- dergone a seismic shift. Its tectonic plates have been grinding against each other for decades, producing spasms of movement between the major con- ferences every few years. Next season, however, its geography will be incom- prehensible. The Big Ten, that venerable Midwestern institution, will now extend from the suburbs of New York to the beaches of Southern California. The Big 12, once based in Texas and the plains, will stretch from West Virginia to Ari- zona. The Atlantic Coast Conference will have the strangest footprint of them all, with two of its three new members located less than an hour's drive from the Pacific Ocean. What's more, the sport's numerology will be just as bewildering as its geog- raphy. The Big Ten will have 18 teams. The Big 12 will have 16. The Pac-12 will have two, or maybe none, the venerated Conference of Champions having been pulled into a subduction zone, perhaps forever. Oh, and the College Football Playoff, which has featured a four-team field for the duration of its decade-long exis- tence, will triple in size to 12. It's the latter change that has aroused the excitement of Penn State and its fans. For a Nittany Lion program that has been stuck in the second tier of the college football hierarchy, a cut below the elites but a cut above just about everyone else, the expansion of the playoff would seem to offer an immense benefit. The Lions were never part of the four- team event, but they finished in the top 12 of the CFP poll six times, most re- cently in 2023. Had next year's format been in place this past season, 10th- seeded Penn State would have faced W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M 2 0 F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 PSU's Path Forward The Lions have plenty of questions to answer heading into a season of change for college football M AT T H E R B | M AT T. H E R B @ O N 3 . C O M THE BIG PICTURE