Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I try to cover interesting developments across the entire college sports industry, from DI to the NAIA, cross-country to ice hockey to volleyball. But this isn’t exactly a secret….in my heart, I’m a college football guy. That’s where I started my career, where I have the deepest fanhood, and where I spend the majority of my time on this newsletter.

With apologies to our friends who played last Saturday, the college football season really starts this evening. Twenty-one FBS games kick off tonight, (starting with Howard at Rutgers), another six tomorrow, and then whoosh, off we go into the first real College Football Saturday.

This is a huge college football season, one at the very forefront of some of the biggest changes the sport has seen in fifty years. Here are five of the biggest storylines I’ll be watching and tracking this season, starting tonight.

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An expanded playoff means more teams than ever before will play meaningful games in November. How do they respond?

The bar was exceptionally high to make the four-team CFP. Before the season started, you knew that if you were a G5 team, you probably didn’t have a shot (only Cincinnati ever earned a spot, and that team beat Notre Dame in September). You knew that you probably couldn’t lose more than one game, and as Florida State learned last season, even going undefeated wasn’t a guarantee of making it.

By the time late November rolled around, the potential Playoff field typically narrowed to just seven or eight teams…if that. You mostly knew who was going to qualify by the time Championship Saturday rolled around.

But in a 12-team field? A single loss, or even two, are no longer automatic disqualifications. Any P4 team with a 10-2 record should be very much in the Playoff conversation, which means teams that don’t typically recruit exactly like Ohio State or Alabama will be fighting for actual championship spots well into the final weeks of the season.

Consider the Big Ten for a moment. Over the last decade, only about five teams ever played after Nov 15 believing they had a legitimate chance of making the playoff, and usually, only three: Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State. But this year, that list could easily double.

Take Iowa, for example. They’re not going to win the league. But the Hawkeyes don’t play Michigan, Oregon, Penn State or USC this season. When they head to LA to play at UCLA on Nov 8, they could very well be 7-1 or 6-2. Could a 10-2 Iowa team with wins over Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Nebraska grab the 4 seed? No way. Could they grab an 11 seed? A real possibility!

Nebraska also doesn’t play Michigan, Penn State or Oregon. If they beat Colorado in week two, they could potentially be 7-1 on Nov 16 heading into a road game against USC. That’s an interesting game last year. This year? Major playoff potential.

There are games like that in every conference. Schools like Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Ole Miss and Utah understood that their margin of error to make a four team playoff was microscopic. It was probably going to be off the table by week seven. But now? Totally different ballgame.

How will players respond to those new stakes? How will fans and coaches respond? Will fans think trading some of the potential drama of early games in September and October for bigger games in November is worth it? How many new schools will get a taste of championship football in Week 10 and beyond?

On that note,

How will fans respond to the pluses, and minuses, of expanded schedules?

In the expanded super conference era, everybody is going to see more “helmet games”, or when two historic and established #brands will meet in the regular season.

So this year, we get USC at Michigan, Washington at Penn State, Oregon at Ohio State and UCLA at Nebraska. In the SEC, we have Georgia at Texas, Oklahoma at Alabama, Georgia at Alabama and Oklahoma at LSU. Those are all awesome.

But expanded conferences and schedules also means that for every SEC Texas game or Oregon Big Ten game means one less game involving more historic conference opponents.

There’s no Bedlam game this season. No Penn State and Michigan. No Alabama and Ole Miss. No Clemson/Miami. No Ohio State and Wisconsin.

Will fans complain? Will ticket sales dip for the less flashy conference games involving newcomers? (Will America be that excited for Oregon and Purdue? Or UCLA at Rutgers?) Will leagues struggle with tiebreaker bloat due to so many teams not playing each other? Or will everybody forget because the Texas/Georgia game was that awesome?

Speaking of travel,

What impact, if any, will so much cross-country travel have?

Back in 2015, Stanford opened the season with a game against a below-average Northwestern team. The game kicked off at 9 AM PT, Stanford looked sluggish, and they lost. Playoff selection committee chairman Jeff Long mentioned Stanford’s “Body Clocks” in that game, which became a meme all season.

But anybody who travels regularly for work knows it isn’t a meme. It’s a pain in the butt to spend all day in an airport, but it feels worse if you’re traveling across multiple time zones. It takes time to get rid of jet lag and acclimated to your surroundings, whether you’re an elite athlete or a washed up dad sportswriter.

Three of the four major conferences now stretch from PST to EST, so late season cross-country travel is going to be a regular occurrence. Cal football will travel more than 10,000 miles this season. USC will log close to 7,000 miles. Florida State, Miami and Oregon will all be in the neighborhood of 6,000 miles. That’s a LOT.

Will any of this show up during the season? Watch games like UCLA at Rutgers or USC at Maryland (both on Oct 19). Oregon has road trips at Purdue (Friday, Oct 18) and Wisconsin (Nov 16!). Cal plays at Wake Forest on Friday, Nov 8, and Stanford goes to NC State on Nov 2.

By and large, most of the major coast-to-coast games are slated for September and October, rather than late in the season…but there are a few in mid-November. Will the Western teams struggle more than expected? Will they enjoy a greater degree of home field advantage earlier in the season? Do charter flights and major budgets mitigate the extended travel more than we think? Only time will tell.

How successful can you REALLY be as a portal-happy team in the 12-team era?

There are lots of ways to build a roster, but if your goal was to build a team that could contend for championships in the four-team era, there was only one path that worked. You needed to recruit as many elite high school players as possible. Every single champion had a blue-chip ratio of over 50%, and almost every team that even made the playoff did. I believe only two non-blue chip teams ever won playoff games…2014 Oregon, and 2023 TCU. Neither won titles.

Heading into this season, there are 16 teams who have recruited at least 50% of their roster from four or five-star recruits. There’s a good chance that multiple playoff teams come from outside this group will make the playoff, perhaps as many as four. It’s unlikely the champion comes from outside this group, but maybe Ole Miss or Tennessee get hot at the right time and break through.

What the blue chip ratio doesn’t track are transfers…and many programs have made building through the transfer portal an integral part of their roster building.

How will this works is kind of a mixed bag so far. There are examples of teams that flipped rosters quickly, added multiple transfers and improved significantly, like Florida State last year, or TCU the year before that. Then there are teams, like USC and Colorado, that failed to reach preseason expectations.

Can teams flip 20+ players in a recruiting cycle and make deep playoff runs, even if their metrics don’t align with the blue-chip ratio? Will another year of data give us a better idea about what is actually possible via the portal, vs high school recruiting?

I don’t think we have enough data yet to be certain, but this year will certainly help.

How does the House settlement and a glut of newish hires impact the coaching market?

Heading into the season, there aren’t a lot of big name coaches on the proverbial hot seat. The industry consensus is that Florida’s Billy Napier, Sam Pittman at Arkansas, Dave Aranda at Baylor and Mario Cristobal at Miami need to show improvement this season or risk potential firing…but there aren’t many names that jump off the page after that.

Part of that is because some coaches who fans might be frustrated with (Ryan Day at Ohio State, Lincoln Riley at USC, Dabo at Clemson) would be owed roughly One Gazillion Dollars in buyout money if they were dismissed. It’s usually not easy to pay eight figure buyouts.

Typically, if the right boosters wanted a guy out badly enough, they could find the money, no matter what the buyout says. But we are also progressing towards a world where schools will soon be able to share revenue directly with athletes, and donors are facing more pressure to help fund player salaries via NIL. If schools are suddenly facing a $20 million new budget line item, and also need to make sure there’s at least an eight million dollar payroll for the football team, can you break the bank to say, get rid of Scott Satterfield, Tony Elliott or Clark Lea?

Maybe, maybe not.

Coaching buyouts continued during COVID budget cuts, and I can’t imagine they’ll dry up completely in this market. But this may be a good test case to see what NIL, Revenue Sharing, increased legal exposure and other factors do for resetting, or least altering, the coaching market.

Of course, surprise retirements or NFL defections, like we had last season, could reset the market anyway….so even if it looks like it may be a more quiet coaching carousel season…you just never know.