Column: College football will be a little different in 2024 … and that’s not a bad thing

August is one of the best months of the year for college football fans, as all the football magazines have hit the newsstands or mailboxes and the itch for football has greatly intensified.

Whether it be high school, college or the NFL, the excitement for football is off the charts, but for this column’s purpose, let’s talk about college football and what we can expect from the upcoming 2024 season.

For starters, Texas and Oklahoma are in the SEC; USC, Oregon, Washington and UCLA are in the Big Ten; and other schools have switched to various conferences.

It is also challenging to remember which players are on which teams entering the ’24 season due to all the transfer portal changes. I’m not saying the aforementioned is a bad thing, but it will take some time to get used to, starting with the Big Ten now having 18 teams in the conference.

The thing about any of the conferences in college football nowadays is you can throw the geographical aspects of membership to a conference out the window because that doesn’t matter anymore. The newest Big Ten members reside on the West Coast, so we’ll get to see more matchups of traditional Big Ten teams against teams they used to just play in the Rose Bowl, which also isn’t just a Big Ten vs. Pac-12 game.

I used to be all for the traditional matchups for college football, but as I’ve grown older — insert the classic Mike Gundy press conference rant to know my age — I’ve realized college football is a business first, and that’s fine. Change can be good, and the future of college sports will be unique, to say the least.

One of the biggest changes is the schedule itself, with all the changes with various conferences.

Take, for example, this upcoming regular season. A Big Ten game will see Ohio State at Oregon on Oct. 12, or on Nov. 2, Michigan will host Oregon. Penn State hosts Washington on Nov. 9, as it will be the first time these two teams play each other in Happy Valley, as this is also a former Rose Bowl matchup.

The two teams who played for the national championship last season are both now Big Ten counterparts, as Michigan and Washington will play each other on Oct. 5 in Washington, plus Michigan will also face the USC Trojans in Big Ten play on Sept. 21 at The Big House.

That’s just a few games that pop off the schedule for ’24 in the Big Ten. We also get a huge SEC game on Oct. 19 when Georgia (everyone’s preseason No. 1 ranked team) goes against Texas in what should be a game between two Top 5 teams at that point of the season.

Back to Oct. 12 and the schedule that day will bring this fall. Have you looked at that day of college football?

The day is scheduled to have an SEC matchup of Mississippi State at Georgia, and there is also Florida at Tennessee, giving us another excellent SEC game, as that’s always billed as the “Largest Tailgate Party.”

There is Washington and Iowa in a Big Ten game, Ohio State is at Oregon, Penn State at USC, South Carolina at Alabama and Texas at Oklahoma. Those are just a few of the games that jump off the schedule.

The new foundation of college football brings us all that slate of games in the seventh week of the season, and that type of scheduling wouldn’t have happened in the traditional ways of the past.

It is going to take some time to get used to the current state of college football not being that way. Yes, I’m going to miss some of the way things were, but with the transfer portal, NIL deals, the return of the NCAA Football video game and everything else that has changed in college football, all of that can be a positive. The best part of all is the games are very close to returning, and all will be right in the world again when the first kickoff of the season takes place.

Stephen Forsha is the sports editor of The Highland County Press. He can be reached at sforsha@gmail.com.

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