For many reasons, Indiana University wasn’t supposed to play the University of Notre Dame in college football this year. Though the two campuses are less than 200 miles apart, the two teams will meet Friday night for the first time since 1991, and just the second time since 1958. Their clash epitomizes both the avalanche of changes that has college football fans fearing for the future of the sport — and a brilliant, madcap season that has shown exactly why those fans love college football in the first place.
To begin with, this game wasn’t even on the schedule until three weeks ago. That it exists at all is thanks to the biggest change for college football’s 2024 season: the 12-team playoff, the bracket for which was announced Dec. 8.
Because bigger conferences can command bigger TV contracts, schools play a game of musical chairs to get into a shrinking number of super-conferences
For much of the 20th century, NCAA football’s top division awarded a national title via polls of sportswriters and coaches. This system frequently produced split decisions or left deserving claimants out in the cold. It took until 1998 for a formal national championship between two teams, until 2014 for that format to expand to a mere four schools, and until 2024 to include 12 teams.
Entering the season, though, no one expected Indiana to be one of those 12 teams. Which brings us to the next major change to college football as fans knew it for more than a century: player pay and transfers.
In recent years, a series of Supreme Court decisions confirmed what everyone suspected: the NCAA’s longstanding insistence that “student athletes” be unpaid amateurs had no basis in law. In its place is a jumbled system that lets athletes profit from their “name, image and likeness” and allows sharply increased freedom to transfer schools if an athlete feels underused — or if donors elsewhere offer more money.
Under the new system, players jump from school to school like never before, and programs can rise and fall with dizzying speed. When Indiana hired Curt Cignetti as its new coach late last year, he was able to bring in more than 30 new players. Indiana’s starting quarterback came from Ohio University; the starting running back, from Wake Forest. The team’s top wide receiver and multiple defensive starters transferred from Cignetti’s previous school, James Madison University. Indiana went from 3-9 in 2023 to its first ten-win team ever — and not by squeaking out victories like a plucky underdog, but by stomping long-superior programs.
Finally, there’s the timing of this game: Friday night, rather than college football’s traditional Saturday kickoffs. That reflects the third big upheaval: television money.
With live sports more valuable to TV networks than ever before, those networks — including, full disclosure, a plucky lil’ channel named NBC — are paying billions for conferences’ television rights. And because bigger conferences can command bigger TV contracts, schools play a game of musical chairs to get into a shrinking number of super-conferences no longer bound by mere geography.
The PAC-12, whose roots go back to 1915, collapsed from 12 teams to two. The Big Ten, long based solely in the Midwest, now spans the continent, from Rutgers University all the way to UCLA. Stanford and Cal joined the “Atlantic” Coast Conference. And the realignment rat race isn’t over — already the PAC-12 has announced plans to add six teams in 2026.
Faced with this tidal wave of changes, many college football fans feared the 2024 season would be a chaotic mess. It was chaotic, yes, but gloriously so. Kansas and Duke joined Indiana as traditionally basketball-oriented schools who have finally found football success. At Colorado, Deion Sanders showed his coaching abilities matched his fame. Old powers from decades gone by, like Southern Methodist University and Army, came roaring back. The fears that a 12-team playoff would devalue the regular season by making losses less significant were largely mistaken. Instead, more teams than ever could consider themselves still in contention right through Thanksgiving week.
Many college football fans feared the 2024 season would be a chaotic mess. It was chaotic, yes, but gloriously so.
That weekend saw the traditional rivalry games — exactly the sorts of clashes fans feared would (understandably) mean less now that players move schools more frequently and no team’s season can be derailed with a single loss. Instead, from coast-to-coast, victorious teams tried to plant flags on their rivals’ turf, sparking several post-game brawls from Ohio to Arizona.
Yes, it’s best that such fights not become a regular occurrence, but they proved the persistence of what writer Rodger Sherman called “the instinctual hate which lives deep inside all college football players…. as soon as they had a chance to make their biggest rival mad.”
Rivalry week culminated in the meeting of Texas and Texas A&M, a rivalry steeped in over a century of animosity. If Texas believes itself the biggest name in the first state of bigness, Texas A&M is the little brother who finds its sibling utterly insufferable. The two teams played every year from 1894 to 2011, when A&M left for the Southeastern Conference. Twelve years later, Texas followed, and the game that never should have been called off resumed, with players and fans alike as bitterly opposed as ever.
More than anything, these games are what make college football great. Sure, if you want to watch the sport at its highest level, there’s the NFL. But these teams don’t just represent a state or a city; they represent cultures. There are some similar cases in pro sports — the powerhouse Yankees vs. the (until recently) plucky Mets — but they are few. In college football, they are legion. My grandfather rooted for Notre Dame because a Notre Dame win was a win for American Catholics in a country tightly gripped by anti-Catholic bigotry. Visiting my in-laws in Texas the week of Thanksgiving, everywhere there were signs for Texas, Texas A&M or, frequently, “a house divided.” Auburn vs. Alabama, Georgia vs. Georgia Tech, Army vs. Navy, USC vs. UCLA, Michigan vs. Michigan St. — these games carry deep sociological connotations that pro sports, for all their virtues, rarely replicate.
One great season does not mean college football is safe. The years ahead are full of uncertainty, and money still threatens to swallow this hodgepodge system whole. But as this new playoff kicks off, one thing is still sure: There’s nothing quite as madcap, as unpredictable, as irreplaceable, as college football.
