Why the conference title matchups are perfect for this wonderfully wild season

By this time one week from now, all of the mystery will be gone. We will know who the conference champions are, what dozen teams made the final College Football Playoff cut, which teams were left on the doorstep holding their spreadsheets of failed proof and who is going where for the holidays.

The never-ending 15-week roller coaster with no brakes that has been the 2024 college football regular season will have finally pulled back into the queue for oil, maintenance and a chance to catch its grass-stained breath before it rolls back out for a much shorter — though not nearly as short as it used to be — run through Bowl Season (©) and the College Football Playoff.

Before we embark on the awarding of rings, cups, Mylar cubes and trophies that look like giant vape pens, let’s pause to look into the rearview mirror for a gaze back toward the yellow brick road that got us here, a journey of heart, brains and courage. Did I see “Wicked” just before I wrote this column? Yes. And that, as we say on “Marty & McGee,” is “apro-pro.”

Because since the season kicked off in Week 0 — 3 months, 10 days, 4,084 miles (the distance between Tallahassee and Dublin) and 3 points (the distance between Georgia Tech and Florida State) ago — we have not had any idea what was going to happen next. And it has all been very weird. We might not have had “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” But we did have Nick Saban as a lion, a fake Mike the Tiger and a Cal Bear equipment manager-turned-Hardy Nickerson.

On ESPN’s @CollegeGameDay, always expect the unexpected…
This morning it’s Nick Saban in a Nittany Lion snuggie – a birthday gift from the @GoPSUsports mascot.

📸 @joshuagateley | @ESPNImages pic.twitter.com/0EYJ5sYlSp

— bill hofheimer (@bhofheimer_espn) November 2, 2024

If anyone knows this @CalFootball equipment guy, please tell him we have a spot on staff for him during @seniorbowl week.#TheDraftStartsInMOBILE™️ pic.twitter.com/Fu1lZSj5C7

— Jim Nagy (@JimNagy_SB) November 25, 2024

However, like that funky five-star gourmet restaurant you had no interest in but were dragged to by your spouse who won’t stop watching Gordon Ramsey shows, it’s the weirdest stuff that comes from the kitchen that you’d never thought of eating before that usually ends up being the most delicious.

Shaking a little black pepper on your strawberries. Spreading peanut butter over your hamburger. Or watching Diego Pavia play quarterback for Vanderbilt and run all over Alabama as if he were Forrest Gump.

This was the year in which we hadn’t expected to talk about Army or Indiana — a pair of programs that have played football for a combined 271 years, but with only 10 bowl wins to show for it — as potential CFP party crashers … and we had that conversation all the way into late November.

This was the year in which conference realignment threw all of our maps into the shredder. In which the Bay Area suddenly became part of the conference named for the Atlantic Coast. In which Texas and Oklahoma introduced a slow-cooked slab of Southwest into the Southeastern Conference. In which the Big 12 became a Big 16 and the Big Ten became a very bicoastal Big 18. We spent this fall struggling with the sight of scores moving through the ESPN Bottom Line that made us say, “UCLA at Rutgers, that’s weird” before adding “Wait, this is a conference game?”

Now the very conference championship games we will watch this weekend are a full slate of newbies versus, er, oldbies. Georgia, Clemson and Iowa State are charter members of the SEC, ACC and Big 12. They will face off against Texas, SMU and Arizona State, all of which have been members of those conferences since summer. Big Ten rookie Oregon, it of the endless kaleidoscope of DayGlo uniform combinations, will face Penn State, a member of the league since 1990 (which used to seem new), and whose idea of an alternate uniform is to put a block number on its helmets and a single stripe on its pants.

This is the season in which practically none of the preseason conference title favorites were able to even reach their conference title games. See: Ohio State, Utah, Florida State, Memphis, Texas State, Liberty. The year in which the Big 12 nearly ended with a seven-way tie for first. OK in fairness, I feel as if that happens most years.

The year in which everyone’s preseason Heisman Trophy favorites seemed to be Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel, in his 15th year of college football, versus a pack of signal-callers from the SEC in Quinn Ewers, Carson Beck, Jalen Milroe and Jaxson Dart. But now, with ballots due Monday, the conversation is dominated by Ashton Jeanty, a back who runs on blue turf; Cam Ward, a QB who isn’t from the SEC but rather the ACC by way of the Pac-12, and Travis Hunter, a Buffalo who plays both ways. Only one of those three, Jeanty, will be onstage for championship weekend.

This was the season in which the idea of routine field storming came, ahem, storming back as if it were the 1990s again. It was very obvious that everyone was out of practice, especially when it was time for the Sun Devils to unleash a desert storm.

Arizona State fans prematurely rushed the field and took down the goal post with one second left in the game 😬 pic.twitter.com/yRENXDqcVb

— ESPN (@espn) November 24, 2024

But then, in the final weekend of the regular season, flag planting suddenly became a thing. A thing that I’m pretty sure no one really wanted and no one seems to have any explanation as to why it did. Admittedly, I’m kind of old. Is there some sort of flag-planting TikTok craze that I’m unaware of? Because, like that door-kicking trend everyone was doing last year, if you plant a flag on your enemy’s 50-yard line, don’t get your feelings hurt if you wind up getting punched in the face. Or maced.

This is the fall in when Florida State, after spending the offseason in court trying to prove it was too good for the ACC, won exactly one ACC game and finished 17th in a conference that I am 100 percent sure no one knew had 17 teams.

The fall that produced perhaps my all-time favorite tree of defeat. Alabama, which entered the season coming off an SEC title, a CFP appearance and with a No. 5 ranking, lost to Vanderbilt … which lost to Georgia State … which lost to Old Dominion … which lost to East Carolina … which lost to Liberty … which lost to Kennesaw State … which lost to UT-Martin … which lost to Missouri State … which lost to Montana … which lost to Weber State … which lost to Northern Colorado, a team that went 1-11 to finish last in the FCS Big Sky Conference. Oh, and Alabama beat Georgia, which beat Texas and those are the two teams that will play for the SEC title Saturday. Oh, and Vandy should have beaten Texas too.

The year 2024 is one in which anything is possible. In which Notre Dame can lose to Northern Illinois, which finished 4-4 in #MACtion — and still finish the regular season ranked fourth in the country. In which a tight end can play his ninth year of college football, as Cam McCormick did at Miami. In which after three weeks and a 1-2 record, Florida Gators boosters can openly declare they will be firing head coach Billy Napier so they can hire Lane Kiffin away from Ole Miss, but ultimately, albeit reluctantly, keep Napier on board … so he can go into Oxford and beat Kiffin’s ninth-ranked Rebels to perhaps knock them out of the playoff.

The year in which, even amid all the fun, the power of the game and the community it creates was on display. When Hurricane Helene dumped more than 40 trillion gallons of rain over the East Coast, it left great college towns and teams quite literally underwater. So what provided the anchor that the good folks of Boone, North Carolina, Johnson City, Tennessee, and others needed as those towns and regions struggled through a seemingly overwhelming recovery? Appalachian State football, East Tennessee State football, and other colleges, large and small, using their stadiums as home bases for relief efforts and, when the time was right, turning on their stadium lights as beacons of hope, faith in the future strengthened through the rallying point of football.

This was the season in which NIL and the transfer portal and all of that conference realignment was going to ruin the sport forever, but instead gifted us with the most unpredictable, entertaining, parity-powered autumn since the highwater height of hysteria known as 2007. In the words of the great Chris Doering, live on SEC Network as Vanderbilt’s students politely filed onto their construction zone of a field to tear down the goalposts and carry them past the Crimson Tide and onto Broadway, this has been the year in which the great teams might not be all that great but the bad teams definitely aren’t all that bad.

Will that last? In the face of all those forces already mentioned, can it be sustained? I have no idea. And neither does anyone else. But those concerns are for another day, another year, another time. This day, this year, and this time is college football 2024. I say we ride this roller coaster all the way into 2025 and see where it goes. Because not knowing what’s around the next bend has worked out pretty well so far.