USC Trojans’ Amon-Ra St. Brown and Drake London celebrate after London’s touchdown catch in their 2019 game against UCLA. PHOTO COURTESY OF STEVE CHENG / FLICKR
Ben Staker
Sports Editor
After a long wait, the college football season is back. With the new twelve-team playoff being implemented this season, the amount of teams that can compete for a National Championship is greater now than ever.
Last season Michigan defeated Washington in the last-ever four-team college football playoff to claim their first National Championship in 26 years.
This will be the first season without the PAC-12 conference, which means the conferences that made up the Power Five are now down to the Big Ten, Big Twelve, SEC, and ACC. It will take some getting used to for college sports fans to recognize the new Power Four conferences. Each remaining conference picked up a couple of schools following the PAC-12’s disbandment.
The Big Ten welcomes Oregon, USC, UCLA, and Washington to the conference. The Big Twelve welcomes Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah. The SEC picked up Texas and Oklahoma. Lastly, the ACC picked up California, SMU, and Stanford.
With the new conference realignment, geographically-based conferences no longer exist. Whether this is better for college football is still to be seen because it’s the first season of this alignment, but it leaves the new college playoff football format scrambling to make changes.
According to the official College Football Playoff website, the original agreement was that each Power Five conference champion would receive an automatic bid, with the four highest-ranked teams receiving a first-round bye and the top seven teams who didn’t win their conference left to fill out the rest of the bracket. Now, the fifth automatic bid goes to the highest-ranked Group of Five conference champion. In case you’re unaware, the Group of Five is made up of the American Conference, Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West, and Sun Belt conferences. Outside of the five automatic bids, the last seven College Football Playoff spots are still given to the seven highest-ranked teams that didn’t win their conference.
There is a lot of change in college football this season and it can be hard to follow, but I’ll put it in simple terms if you still don’t understand. The PAC-12 no longer exists and the College Football Playoff now consists of twelve teams. The top four seeds are awarded to the Power Four conference champions and the last automatic bid goes to the highest-ranked Group of Five conference champion. The last seven spots are given to the seven highest-ranked teams that didn’t win their conference.
I’m still on the fence about the conference realignment, but I can definitively say that I love the twelve-team playoff. I think giving more teams the opportunity to win a National Championship creates more parity for the sport, and that’s what many people love to see as well.