Very few settings in life add up to the buzz of a college campus on a Saturday in the Fall. Whether it's a noon kick off or a nationally televised 8pm prime time slot, once the sun rises it's gameday. Students, alumni, parents, siblings, faculty, and fans gather from all over to support their school. Often they hang out and tailgate for hours before the game, they grill meat, they guzzle beer, they play cornhole, they lounge in lawn chairs under canopies, and they don their school colors while they pregame before the real game. And then come the best parts: the sea of home colors, the marching band, the pre kickoff traditions, and then of course cheering the good ole alma mater on to victory.
Truthfully, explaining college football sometimes creates more questions than answers. Why do we rank teams before the season even starts? Why are there so many bowl games? Why does the Big 12 have 10 teams and the Big 10 have 14 teams? If Alabama is the Crimson Tide, why is the mascot an elephant? And what do half the mascots mean...what's a Hokie or a Terrapin or a Razorback? Simply, there are some things in college football that just do not have much logic behind them, but does that make us love it any less? Absolutely not. But for now, we'll cover some of the basics and intricacies that have a rhyme and reason.
Format
There are actually 130 Division 1 College Football teams but only about 60 or so "major" ones that have a real chance at winning a national championship, which is the ultimate end goal. These teams are divided into 5 major conferences, known as the "Power 5". These were created by geographic region and are the ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference), SEC (South Eastern Conference), Big 10 (mainly the midwest), Big 12 (mainly the southwest), and the Pac 12 (Pacific Coast). A brief explanation of each is below:
ACC - 14 members, split into two divisions of 7. The Atlantic Division's members are Florida State, Clemson, Boston College, Syracuse, North Carolina State, Louisville, and Wake Forest. The Coastal's members are Miami, North Carolina, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Pittsburgh, and Duke. The team with the best conference record in each division will play for the conference championship.
Big 12- 10 members, no division. The members are Texas, Texas Tech, West Virginia, TCU (Texas Christian University), Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas, and Kansas State. The teams with the two best conference record will play for the conference championship.
Big 10- 14 members split into two divisions of 7. The Big 10 East consists of Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State, Maryland, Indiana, and Rutgers. The Big 10 West consists of Wisconsin, Purdue, Illinois, Northwestern, Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska. The team with the best conference record in each division will play for the conference championship.
Pac 12- 12 members split into two divisions of 6. The Pac 12 North consists of Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington State, Stanford, and California. The Pac 12 South consists of UCLA, USC, Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah. The team with the best conference record in each division will play for the conference championship.
SEC- 14 members split into two divisions of 7. The SEC East consists of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. The SEC West consists of Alabama, Auburn, LSU, Arkansas, Texas A&M, Mississippi (known as Ole Miss), and Mississippi State.
*Notre Dame is an independent team that does not belong to a conference but plays a collection of teams from each of the conferences.
There are more lower tier conferences past the Power 5 but we will skip these for now.
Regular Season Explained
Each school plays 12 regular season games between Labor Day weekend and Thanksgiving. 8-9 of these will be against teams within their conference, and the other 3-4 against teams outside of their conference. The games the weekend after Thanksgiving are known as "Rivalry Week", because it is the final week of the regular season and teams traditionally play their biggest rival on this week. And in college football rivalries tower in significance to all other sports. Teams that reach the conference championship game will play this additional 13th game. What I cannot stress enough is that this is the most regular season in all of sports. Only 4 teams advance to the college football playoff, and this is determined by a selection committee of experts. Thus this playoff will likely consist of entirely undefeated and one loss teams.
To illustrate this I'll use a metaphor I read recently. Making the college football playoff is like 60 people trying to cross an extremely thin sheet of ice. Basically, each Saturday you sit on your couch/at the bar/at the watch party/ at the game/ wherever you are and see who plunges into the ice. Most years 1-3 of these teams will get all the way across the pond without falling in. The majority of teams who lose a game or more will end up sinking and dying, but one or two of them will survive and struggle their way back up to the surface again.
If you're one of those teams that's outside of the top 4 but still in the hunt, you care about other team's games' much moreso than other sports also. For example, let's say Florida State is sitting ranked 8th late in the season and played and won their game early in the day, but then chaos insues in the late games. All of sudden, #3 Oregon is losing to Utah? #5 Georgia is in a dogfight with Auburn? #6 Texas is tied with Oklahoma State? So when this sort of chaos occurs Florida State fans keep a watchful eye because such losses could be a death blow to other teams' playoff chances and opportunity to resurrect theirs. An opportunity to get out of the freezing water and back into the race.
Tldr; regular season games matter A LOT. Every week is a must win.
How does the playoff committee determine who makes the playoff?
They evaluate each team's "resume" and a plethora of data that helps build it. These include things like Strength of Schedule (how good a team's opponents were), quality losses (if you lost a game, to whom? by how much?), quality wins (did you beat other ranked teams? Who? How many?) whether or not they won a conference championship, and head to head competition if it occured. This is how the committee primarily differentiates between similar teams.
As an example we will look at last year. Three teams finished undefeated : Alabama, Clemson, and Notre Dame, and they were ranked in that order. Three other teams were being considered for the final spot, 12-1 Oklahoma, 12-1 Ohio State, and 11-2 Georgia. So let's take a look at what each of those 3 brings to the table.
Ohio State and Oklahoma each won their conference championships, however Georgia did not as they lost to Alabama in the SEC Championship game. However, Georgia played the nation's most difficult schedule, Ohio State's schedule was ranked 11th, Oklahoma's was 16th. In terms of ranked wins, Oklahoma has 3 which came against #15 Texas, #16 West Virginia, and #24 Iowa State. Ohio State has 3 as well: #7 Michigan, #12, Penn State, and #22 Northwestern. Georgia also has 3: #10 Florida, #14 Kentucky, #23 Missouri. Perhaps what truly separates these teams is the losses however. Oklahoma's lone loss came on a last second field goal to #15 Texas, which they then avenged by beating Texas in the Big 12 Championship game. Georgia unfortunately has two losses, one was awfully impressive losing to #1 Alabama by a touchdown in the SEC championship, but then a second loss to #11 LSU by 20. Ohio State only has one loss but its a bad one...49-20 to unranked Purdue.
Ultimately, the committee decides that Georgia's 2 losses and lack of a conference title, as well as Ohio State's bad loss to Purdue, are enough credibility to move Oklahoma into the 4th seed. Of course fans and experts debate this afterwards. Georgia gets screwed by playing in the same conference as Alabama and played the toughest schedule. Ohio State played 1 bad game, but 11 other good ones, including a 40 point win over #7 archrival Michigan. But no matter what the committee decides there was always be arguments for what they didn't.
From there it goes as you'd expect. #1 plays #4. #2 plays #3. The winner of each game advances to the national championship, where our champion is crowned.
Eligibility and Adding New Players
A traditional college football players has 5 years to play 4 seasons. Until recently, they had to sit out the remaining year, which they typically did as a freshman. However last year this rule was modified and now they can appear in 4 or less games. When this happens it is called a "redshirt". It is most common in young quarterbacks who are still learning the college playbook and adjusting to the speed of college defenses. It is also a good time for younger players to focus on putting on more muscle mass before they see real game action. So for example, lets say a quarterback arrives as a true freshman but only plays in 2 games, he then becomes a redshirt freshman next season rather than a true sophomore, and then his third year he would be a redshirt sophomore, his fourth a redshirt junior, and his fifth a redshirt senior. He can play in all 12 games every year except his first. Players are also eligible to leave school early and leave for the NFL draft after as early as three years...so when they are either a true junior or redshirt sophomore.
Unlike the NFL, which utilizes a draft, college football programs supplement through recruiting. During this process, coaches physically travel to and visit the homes of high school players they would like to recruit to their program and also host them on visits to their schools. Coaches will try to sell players on their school for a variety of reasons well beyond how successful their program is. These include nearness to home, facilities, opportunity for early playing time, a need for their position, selling them on an academic program if they need to, and they work hard to keep consistent communication flowing between the recruit and a head coach, assistant coaches, current players, and other fellow recruit targets. The recruiting process ends when a recruit puts pen to paper and signs officially with a school, and this happens in a window between late December and early February for each class. Recruits can verbally commit to a school prior to those dates, but they can also rescind or even flip from those verbal commitments on signing day.
The Heisman
The Heisman trophy is an annual award presented to the best player in college football. 3-5 finalists are selected and then voted upon by sports journalists as well as previous Heisman winners. 95% of the time the award goes to a quarterback and the majority of the remaining 5% it goes to a running back. In fact the last non quarterback or running back to win the award was when Michigan wide receiver Desmond Howard won in 1991. Only once has the same player won the award twice, in 1974 and 1975 when Ohio State running back Archie Griffin won the award.
In conclusion
I'm sure this feels like information overload and probably further confuses things to some extent. In many ways college football makes little since but who says love has to? No one earns their degree in college football expertise overnight, but this should help you be much more aware. At the end of the day it's really about having a voice that's ready to cheer and a heart that can accept any outcome, great or bad, magical or heartbreaking (and yes, there will be both). Once you've got that, waking up to gameday on Saturdays in the Fall becomes terribly exciting.
