As the sun rose on a new football season in 2024, college football fans woke up to bomb shell headlines. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) announced that the playoffs, which take place at the end of each season, would be expanding from four teams to twelve. This was a huge change that made all college football teams and fans shed a tear of pure happiness. 

   This isn’t the first time the playoffs have expanded as before the 2014 season, the top two teams in the Associated Press poll would play each other for the championship, with no semifinal games coming before it. This was then changed to the four team playoff rules we have been playing by for the past 10 years.  

   With this format there comes a lot of change, including adding a whopping eight new teams and the question of how we are going to sort out brackets. 

   The first major change is that each champion of one of the four main Division I conferences gets a first round bye. A bye means that the team gets the first round of games off, they then play whoever wins the games in the first round who played. This gives these teams some rest and time to prepare for the competition ahead. 

   The next eight teams are decided based on what the playoff committee thinks are the next best in Division I. The higher seeded or next best teams in the polls outside of the conference champions will get to host their first round games in their home stadium and in front of their home crowd. After the first round the quarter finals will be played either on New Years Eve or New Year’s Day. 

   The matchups for each game are decided by what they are seeded. According to Maya Ellison, a reporter for the NCAA, the first round games will be the number five-seed playing the twelve-seed, the six seed will play the eleven seed, the seven seed will play the ten seed, and the eight seed will play the nine seed respectively. The winners of those games will move on to the quarter finals. 

   The next round of games won’t be played in either of the team’s home fields, so no team gets a technical home field advantage, however fan base travelling is still possible. After these games are done and the next teams advance to the semifinal, it goes right back to a regular four team playoff format. The winners of the semifinal games will move on to the final, and the winner of the final becomes the champion. 

   These new rules are sure to spark excitement across the nation, and spike the popularity of the college football playoff even more.