ALTOONA, Pa. -- Welcome to the end. The end of college football as we know it, with the series finale airing Monday night in the national title game between Michigan and Washington.
After that, we enter the expanded playoff era.
And everything will change.
Now, change can be really good sometimes. Or really bad. Most of the time, it's a little bit of both.
Whether fans like the major changes coming to college football remains to be seen, but be prepared, they are a coming!
FIRST, THE GOOD NEWS
We've talked about this for a couple of years now, about how the expanded playoff should be really good for Penn State. So good that the Lions could benefit from a 12-team field more than any other program in the country.
The reason why is simple: Penn State has never made the four-team playoff, but it would have reached a 12-team field six times in the past eight seasons had there been one (2016, '17, '18, '19, '22, '23).
There are plenty of reasons to believe Penn State can make a 12-team playoff six or seven times a decade going forward.
It had better, anyway. Because from now on it's gonna be ...
PLAYOFF OR BUST!
This will be the new norm for Penn State and other programs in the sport's top tiers. If the Lions do not make the playoff in a given year, the season will be seen as a failure. Period.
Is that fair? Ehh, maybe not, because sometimes 9-3 can still be a good year under certain circumstances.
But circumstances won't matter anymore to fans of Penn State and 15 or so other top programs. If their team misses the playoff, it will create a lot of turmoil within the program and fan base.
James Franklin will be among the group of coaches who will be expected to not only make the playoff most years, he'd also better win a game or two on a good number of occasions.
Just like in college basketball, all programs are judged based on NCAA Tournament appearances. The best programs are judged on how often they can make deep runs in the tourney.
HURTING THE REGULAR SEASON
This is the part I hate most about the expanded playoff.
College football has always had the best regular season in all of American sports.
Every. Game. Matters.
For many years, one loss killed your chances of winning a title. Then the four-team playoff made it to where you could lose once and still have a shot.
Going forward, many teams will be able to lose twice and still make the top 12. There could even be instances where a team loses three times and is still in the top 12, like Penn State was when it went 9-3 in 2018.
WEAKER NON-CON SCHEDULING
Fans had better get used to this, because many are going to hate it.
Franklin doesn't want to play difficult opponents in the non-con. All that does is increase the chances of losing, which increase the chances of missing the playoff.
When their jobs are on the line, a lot of coaches just simply will not risk playing strong non-con opponents. Penn State fans, therefore, should get used to a heavy dose of the likes Delaware, Buffalo and Kent State.
And, most likely, you can forget about playing Pitt, aside from maybe one brief series every 20 years or so. As a reminder, the loss to Pitt in 2016 essentially prevented Penn State from making the playoff, and Franklin knows it.
WELCOME TO THE NEW BIG TEN, SEC
Adding USC, Oregon, Washington and UCLA will make things very, interesting in the league. Many have said that adding several more good teams will make it more difficult for Penn State to reach the playoff, and that's certainly possible.
But ... the Lions will no longer be playing both Ohio State and Michigan in the same season. That's a gigantic positive, because most years, none of those Pac-12 additions will be as good as the Buckeyes or Wolverines, whoever is not on the schedule that year.
Also next year, Texas and Oklahoma will join the SEC.
Wow! Those two leagues have dominated college football for a long time, and they will be even stronger with all their new additions.
BOWL GAMES WON'T MATTER AT ALL
If you're not in the playoff, bowl games will become even more meaningless than they already are.
Penn State missed the playoff last season but went to the Rose Bowl, which was still an awesome fallback. This season, the Lions wound up in a prestigious New Year's Six game, the Peach Bowl, and that was still a terrific destination.
Going forward, there's no bowl game Penn State can go to that will matter a whole heck of a lot to really anybody. The Citrus and Outback bowls have always been nice destinations, but those will be as meaningless as any others for a program like Penn State.
If you think opt-outs are bad now, wait until a team like Penn State finds itself out of the playoff. It's reasonable to think that 15-20 players or more could opt out of those games.
PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO CFP RANKINGS
OK, so this is something I've been wanting to write for a while. Follow along closely.
Over the years, most people have paid very little attention to the regular-season College Football Playoff rankings beyond the top four. And in the final rankings, all that's really mattered has been who's in the top four.
But when we get to a 12-team field, the playoff committee's work is going to need to be scrutinized extremely heavily. In short, the committee won't be able to get away with its usual weird and relatively arbitrary decisions regarding certain teams and situations.
This season, Penn State was 10th in the final CFP rankings and would have played at the No. 7 seed. Well, the No. 7 seed was Ohio State, so clearly it matters when it comes to justifying where EVERY team is seeded.
The committee put Alabama in the top four instead of undefeated Florida State, because the Seminoles had lost their starting QB and were nowhere near the same team.
But ...
Florida State was still ahead of Georgia (No. 6) and Ohio State (No. 7), even though both of those teams were realistically better. If the goal is to rank the better teams higher, then how can the committee justify putting Florida State at No. 5 over better teams?
It didn't matter this year, though, because only four teams made it, and so putting Florida State at No. 5 was a reward for its unbeaten regular season as opposed to how well it might have competed in a playoff.
Next year, there's no way the committee could justify having Florida State ahead of Georgia and Ohio State. Every single spot in the rankings must be fully justified because each will lead directly to playoff matchups. With teams 5-8 hosting first-round playoff games, the committee has to get those right because those decisions will impact the entire tournament.
I, for one, don't have a whole lot of faith that the committee is going to get everything right when trying to come up with the 12 teams and then ranking them all correctly.
Buckle up, folks. If you love college football, be prepared for everything to change next season.
