What does a 12-team playoff mean for college football? One word: hope

Perhaps the most anticipated — and certainly most reformatted — college football season kicks off at noon ET Saturday when Florida State and Georgia Tech clash in Ireland. Week 0 they call it.

It’s fitting the Seminoles are involved in ushering in a new era — namely the first season with the kind of expansive, 12-team playoff a sport with 134 teams needs.

It was just nine months ago, after all, that they were trap-doored by the old four-team model which deemed their 13-0, ACC championship team unworthy of the playoff because they’d lost star quarterback Jordan Travis to injury. It was the worst snub in the 10-year history of the College Football Playoff and will forever spoil what was otherwise a magical season in Tallahassee.

“I was just hurt for our players to be honest with you,” FSU coach Mike Norvell said. “It was one of the tougher moments I’ve had to experience.”

No unbeaten major conference champ will ever have to experience it again.

As much as the focus has been on NIL payments, the transfer portal and new teams in new conferences, it’s the playoff that will most impact the way this sport is consumed.

Assuring broader access to the playoff is really about how teams can approach the season, how long they can remain in contention, how absolutely wild the November stretch run promises to be and then that glorious December weekend when we have four playoff games … played on campus.

Hope is a powerful tool.

Consider a slew of SEC teams that enter the season with palpable excitement that hasn’t always been present.

In years past, a good-to-great contender had to wonder if they could really win the conference, finish perfect or maybe with just one loss in order to get to the playoff. That meant somehow climbing over Alabama, Georgia or sometimes LSU. It was daunting. In the end, none made the four-team field.

Back then, the way to college football dominance was to stack a series of top-five, or maybe top-10 recruiting classes on top of each other. But it wasn’t like Alabama and Georgia weren’t doing that, too, making movement at the top nearly impossible.

In the 10 years of the four-team playoff, just 15 teams filled the 40 cumulative bids. And just six teams — Alabama (8), Clemson (6), Ohio State (5), Oklahoma (4), Georgia (3) and Michigan (3) — accounted for 29 of the bids.

That left a lot of good-to-great teams on the outside, essentially resigned to their fate.

Not this year. For the first time in forever, the July media days were full of coaches at places such as Missouri, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Texas A&M, Penn State and others trying to manage expectations, in a good way.

The chances of any of the above putting together a perfect or near-perfect season this year is remote. They no longer have to though. Could Missouri, with talent up and down the roster, go 10-2 and get in? Absolutely. Could Tennessee with a ferocious defense and a potential star at quarterback in Nico Iamaleava? You bet.

It goes on.

Just playing nationally meaningful games late in the season will be a boost to teams such as these across the country. Just getting into the playoff would be incredible.

“As we know for the NFL, if you make the playoffs, anything can happen,” Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz told the Rich Eisen Show. “If you get hot and it’s the right matchups, you can win.”

And what about getting the chance to host a game — say a 7th-seeded Ole Miss hosting 10th-seeded Notre Dame, showcasing the Grove to a national audience in a stand-alone, win-or-go-home game? It would likely be the biggest sporting event in the history of the state.

You don’t have to win it all for the season to be special, a far cry from last year when Florida State won them all and got ignored.

“[Now] if you take care of business and become the best team in the conference, you get a direct path to go and compete for a national championship,” Norvell said.

Over the last five to 10 years, the season would begin with maybe three or four actual national title contenders. Maybe that group this year — say Georgia, Ohio State, Oregon and Texas — will still produce the champion, but the fun isn’t limited.

The possibilities have extended far beyond the usual suspects. There has been playoff bid talk at Iowa, Rutgers, Virginia Tech, North Carolina State, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Utah and so on.

It also means teams have some time to develop. Consider Michigan, the reigning national champions. The Wolverines should have one of the country’s elite defenses, yet there are questions about who will play quarterback. In the past, a single early season loss — in this case, potentially Week 2 when Texas visits — might doom them. Now if, say, Alex Orji develops across the season and the offense becomes potent, the Wolverines could be back in the mix by November, let alone December.

There is no question the tightrope walk of the season has been altered. Elimination games will now come later in the season. That’s a change, and some fans won’t like it.

Overall, though, more games will matter more. And as we enter the 2024 season, there is far more anticipation in far more places than there has even been.