The College Football Playoff (CFP) has reshaped the way we crown a national champion, but this year marks a new chapter in its history.

With the regular season having concluded two weeks ago, college football conference title games took place the weekend of Dec. 8, and for the first time in CFP history, there were more than just three playoff games held in the holiday season.

After the CFP Board of Managers made the decision to expand the current playoff format from four to 12 teams, there has been a lot of controversy within the football world. Many fans, players, coaches, and critics have voiced their perspectives on this new format and are invested in how it will play out.

One of the main points of controversy during this transition to this new system has been the unnecessary and undue difficulty imposed on some teams’ path to the championship. 

All of these opinions have surfaced without a single playoff game being played.

This upcoming season marks one of the most groundbreaking structural shifts in college sports history: the introduction of Name, Image, Likeness (NIL), a policy that provides college athletes the right to sign endorsement deals and earn revenue off the field.

Passed in 2021, the impact of NIL has been striking, specifically in regard to team development. 

For example, most – if not all – of the teams seen in this new playoff format have spent millions of dollars just on players. 

This is so intriguing because most assume that small schools have less money to spend on their athletes, therefore putting them at a competitive disadvantage, and this proves true for the inaugural 12-team playoff. More than half of the teams in the 2024 field come from the Big 10 and the SEC, the two richest conferences in the country.

The top four pre-eminent conference winners in the new CFP format will receive automatic first round byes, while the fifth conference winner, if ranked outside of the top 12, will be the twelfth seed. The remaining eight highest-ranked teams will take part in the on-campus first round games, where seeds five through eight will be the hosts of these matchups.

After the first round of games, the matchups will move from college campuses to bowl games. These bowls are played all over the country with the aim of avoiding any home field advantage for teams. These events include the Rose, Peach, Fiesta, and Sugar bowls, held in Pasadena, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Glendale, Arizona; and New Orleans, Louisiana.

This fresh format has already been finalized, with the release of the brackets on the morning of Dec. 8, and we are excited. Here are the set matchups.