College football season is drawing closer, and the 2024 season is set to be the most unique one yet.
The 2024 College Football Playoff will expand to 12 teams this season, featuring the top four ranked conference champion teams receiving a first round BYE with teams seeded five through 12 featuring the other Power 5 conference champion and the next six highest ranked teams in the eyes of the College Football Playoff Committee.
This is a big change that will open up the field for many schools to compete on the biggest stage for a National Championship, but the odds at the top remain quite the same, with Georgia as the clear favorite, the winner of two of the past three Naitonal Championships.
However, the odds are shifting for more teams further down the board, once viewed as complete non factors in the National Championship picture, as seen below.
Georgia narrowly missed out on the opportunity to three-peat in the CFP last season, but Kirby Smart’s bunch are expected to be right in the mix in this season, listed as the favorite with potential No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 Carson Beck under center.
Behind Georgia is a handful of loaded teams, including Ohio State, who will look to prevail in the new-look Big Ten with Kansas State transfer Will Howard replacing Kyle McCord as well as Ole Miss transfer Quinshon Judkins joining the likes of TreVeyon Henerson in the backfield to mkae a potent offense around an elite defense.
Two teams on the move are expected to adjust quickly with Texas jumping to the SEC this season with Quinn Ewers at quarterback in hopes of making it back to the CFP and into the National Championship picture. In addition, Oregon is now in the Big Ten with Oklahoma transfer filling in for now Denver Broncos quarterback Bo Nix and the Ducks firmly in the mix to breakthrough this season after failing to make the CFP since 2014.
While the cream will likely rise to the top, for the first time ever, there are more teams truly viable to make the postseason, and with that more opportunities for teams to make a run in the postseason, more similar to the NFL style.
Overall, there are 10 teams with odds of +2500 or shorter, making this by default the most wide open College Football Playoff field in history.
Stay tuned for more coverage this offseason ahead of what should be an epic season in the first of the new college football.
Game odds refresh periodically and are subject to change.
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Five years ago, in “The Art of Coaching” documentary that highlighted the bond between Bill Belichick and Nick Saban, the then-Alabama coach ripped off a rant on NFL teams, and how they handled evaluating his players ahead of the draft.
“One thing that you do, that a lot of the NFL guys don’t do, I don’t know that you’ve ever picked one of our guys if you never talked to me before picking him,” Saban said to Belichick. “And there’s a few other guys in the league that do that. But then there’s another 30 teams that I never hear from, and then they pick somebody and I’m saying, ‘They picked that guy?’ And then they say, ‘Well, we didn’t know this.’ Well, all you had to do is call and I would have told you the good stuff and I would’ve told you any issue.”
Count the Detroit Lions as a team that listens to Saban.
Two consecutive years, they’ve come away from the NFL draft with the guy NFL folks had tabbed as the legendary coach’s favorite in the class. Last year, it was Brian Branch, who became an integral part of the Detroit defense, and a Swiss Army knife for defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn. This year, it’s Terrion Arnold, a corner the Lions never thought would be there in the 20s.
Detroit had actually laid groundwork for a trade up—I believe Missouri DE Darius Robinson was the target—which made it easy to pivot and get aggressive in going up from No. 29 to No. 24 to land a falling Arnold.
For his part, Saban loved how Arnold took hard coaching, and attacked the challenge the coaches put in front of him, in sticking with him at corner rather than projecting him to safety like other schools had in recruiting him. Also, Detroit took note of how Saban played him at the “star” position (nickel corner), as well as outside corner. As the Lions see it, being deployed as the star at Alabama is a huge sign of trust and respect from Saban, because of the mental and physical burden he puts on that spot, and the versatility he demands from it.
Branch, for what it’s worth, played a lot there, too.
In this case, it wasn’t like it had been the year before, where GM Brad Holmes personally connected with Saban (they’d talked about Branch and Jahmyr Gibbs last year). But Detroit did have a couple of high-level staffers get to Saban on Arnold, confirming what they’d seen. Which, in the end, made going after Arnold a no-brainer when he slipped.
• There are a lot of stories where a fortunate twist can play into a team drafting a certain player—and the Chargers will have one of those from 2024 if, years from now, OT Joe Alt becomes the sort of franchise cornerstone Joe Hortiz and Jim Harbaugh think he can be.
The fact that the GM and coach were new did limit, to a degree, what they were personally able to do during this draft cycle. But the Chargers were able to get guys out on the road enough, both on the coaching and scouting side. And one such lieutenant that traveled around was veteran line coach Mike Devlin.
As luck would have it, he was assigned to run drills for the offensive line prospects at Notre Dame’s pro day in March. That allowed Devlin to challenge Alt, and to also get to know him better with the extra time he’d get with the Irish captain. Now, it’s not like there were too many revelations on the visit. Everyone knew what sort of player he was. But with the Chargers also liking Alabama RT JC Latham, the little things did make a difference.
The biggest question now is where Alt will fit on the line. All 33 of his starts at Notre Dame came at left tackle, the position Rashawn Slater plays for the Chargers. The plan is to let Alt compete for the starting right tackle spot. That said, he played tight end in high school, and wound up starting at left tackle as a true freshman at Notre Dame. So the lift might not be as heavy for Alt as it would be for others.
And that’s what made this pick so easy for the Chargers. Alt will figure it out, and at a baseline be a really good pro with a chance to be much better, making him the rare high floor-high ceiling prospect. He has some stuff to work on such as his ability to anchor (though the Chargers would tell you to watch how, in those spots, he bends and recovers). But with the presence and intelligence he showed the Chargers in meetings, it’s a good bet that Alt will keep ascending.
The Chiefs guaranteed all $17 million of Kelce's salary for 2024.
Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
• The Chiefs did right by Travis Kelce, giving the future Hall of Famer what amounts to a plain-old raise Monday—usually teams will require adding years to a player’s contract in exchange, or moving money away from a future year, for giving them this sort of pay bump.
Kelce’s existing contract had a $12 million base salary for this year, with another $750,000 in per-game roster bonuses, and a $250,000 roster bonus. The Chiefs gave him another $4 million, guaranteeing all $17 million for 2023. They left his $17.25 million for 2025 intact, added a trigger that’ll guarantee most of it in March (in the form of an $11.5 million roster bonus due on the third day of the league year), and force the team to make a decision on whether to keep him at the start of free agency.
The two-year deal makes Kelce the highest paid tight end in the NFL heading into a season in which he’ll turn 35. It’s also, truth be told, not that big of a number. He’s making less, in fact, on an APY (average per year) basis than Cleveland Browns WR Jerry Jeudy. Which is to say everything is relative, and in that sense a great tight end is a much better deal in today’s NFL than is a good receiver.
• As happy as the Minnesota Vikings were to get J.J. McCarthy where they did with the 10th pick, I’d say they were more surprised that pass rusher Dallas Turner slipped as deep into the teens as he did, which prompted the reaction from Kevin O’Connell that the team’s in-house crew captured.
In the end, they got two guys who were projected in the top 10 in a series of trade-ups without giving up an additional first-round pick to do it. The downside? It comes in volume. They wound up with seven picks after coming in with nine, and none of those picks came on Day 2 (they had one pick between 17 and 177, and that was at 108). As it stands now, they will have only four picks next year—their own first-rounder, a third-round compensatory pick for Kirk Cousins, their own fifth-rounder, and another fifth-rounder they acquired in the Za’Darius Smith trade.
• With the deadline Thursday, we know that nine of the top 12 picks in the 2021 draft have had their fifth-year option picked up. The three that haven’t, and won’t, are all quarterbacks who have been traded—Zach Wilson, Trey Lance and Justin Fields.
The teams that took those three certainly felt the pain of the misses, but each has recovered nicely. And throw Mac Jones in there, and you have four of five first-round quarterbacks from that year’s class dealt, without a single Day 1 or Day 2 pick included in any of the four trades.
• Interestingly enough, only six of the remaining 22 first-rounders from that year have had their fifth-year options picked up.
• Ezekiel Elliott showed last year with the New England Patriots that he can still play. That said, the Dallas Cowboys can’t run him the way they did in Elliott’s previous stint. I was pretty surprised, as such, that the Cowboys didn’t use one of their eight picks on the position, though they do think highly of Rico Dowdle and Deuce Vaughn.
• It wasn’t a huge surprise that the New York Giants punted on quarterback with Drake Maye three picks before their first-round selection at No. 6—word circulated around the NFL that New York had become a Maye-or-no-QB team over the couple of weeks leading up to the draft. And since they did offer their 2025 first-rounder to get to No. 3, you can see New York saw a gap between the top three and the next three in the class.
• As for how the teams had the guys ranked, the Vikings really dove in on the guys after the top two, and had Maye (for whom they offered 11, 23 and a 2025 first-rounder, with pick swaps favoring them bringing some value back), then McCarthy. The Falcons had Michael Penix Jr. behind Caleb Williams and Jayden Daniels (with a few folks in their building personally having Penix second). And Denver had Nix behind only Williams and Daniels.
Latu could be a huge get for the Colts if his neck in healthy.
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
• I can appreciate the video of Colts GM Chris Ballard saying the Indianapolis Colts got the draft’s best pass rusher in Laiatu Latu. Most people, maybe all, I talked to about the UCLA star before the draft told me his tape was the best among the pass rushers. But that’s not the question with Latu; it’s the condition of his nick. But if he’s healthy? Paired with DeForest Buckner in that front, look out.
Some of the biggest names in men’s college basketball spent the last two months in limbo, weighing pro and college options down to the NCAA’s NBA draft withdrawal deadline Wednesday. In all, most of the big names in the sport elected to return to school, aided by massive NIL packages that have ballooned in recent months compared to previous years. That, plus this being the final season of players with a bonus year of eligibility because of the COVID-19 pandemic, has rosters around the sport looking loaded.
Here’s a look at some of the biggest winners and losers from the decision deadline.
One of the biggest 50-50 decisions on deadline day was Tide star guard Mark Sears, who averaged 21 points per game on Alabama’s Final Four team in 2023–24. His Wednesday evening announcement that he’s back with the Tide propels Alabama into a legitimate contender for the No. 1 spot in preseason polls, augmenting loaded portal and high school recruiting classes. And to further boost the Tide’s incredible day, talented rising sophomore Jarin Stevenson decided to return for another year as well, which makes this group even deeper and more talented.
Essential in the Huskies’ quest for a third straight national championship was the return of Alex Karaban. With UConn’s four other starters already turning pro, Karaban’s return looms large, giving the Huskies a proven star and one of the better shooters in college basketball. Karaban could likely have gotten drafted in the early-to-middle part of the second round and earned a guaranteed contract, but instead is coming back to finish his degree and take a crack at yet another title. He should be one of the best players in the country next season and could play his way into the back end of the first round of next year’s draft with a big junior season.
The Wildcats had a good offseason in the portal, but much of the work done by Tommy Lloyd & Co. this spring seemed built around a potential Caleb Love return. Arizona got confirmation Wednesday that Love is headed back to school, a massive addition to an already impressive roster. Despite his flaws in shot selection at times, Love is one of the best guards in the country, fresh off averaging better than 18 points, four rebounds and three assists per game on a team that earned a No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament. We’ll see if he can lift the Wildcats to a Final Four for the first time since 2001.
Love staying at Arizona adds to an already impressive roster for the Wildcats. / Rob Gray-USA TODAY Sports
Wake’s hopes of its first NCAA tournament berth under Steve Forbes hinged on Hunter Sallis withdrawing from the draft. Sallis, who starred for the Demon Deacons in his first season in the program after transferring from the Gonzaga Bulldogs, decided to come back for one more year, giving a massive lift to a Wake team that came up just short of the Big Dance a year ago. Sallis should be one of the nation’s best guards, and the Deacs should be tougher on the interior this season after adding transfers Tre’Von Spillers (Appalachian State Mountaineers), Omaha Biliew (Iowa State Cyclones) and Churchill Abass (DePaul Blue Demons).
Payton Sandfort, the second-leading returning scorer in the Big Ten, took his decision down to the wire. Eventually though, the sharpshooting wing elected to return to school, providing Iowa a boost it desperately needed heading into 2024–25. Sandfort should be in for a massive senior season, and the Hawkeyes have more talent around him this year with young players Owen Freeman and Josh Dix set to break out and transfer forward Seydou Traore expected to make an impact.
Kentucky didn’t have any players on the fence about returning, but was as big a beneficiary as anyone of draft withdrawals after top transfer wing Jaxson Robinson simultaneously withdrew from the draft and announced his commitment to Kentucky. Robinson had long been speculated about as a potential Kentucky target given he played for new Wildcats coach Mark Pope at BYU, but was seen as a true 50-50 to stay in the draft or turn pro. Plus, Robinson had made clear that his recruitment was open to other schools than just Kentucky. Winning this battle helps boost Pope’s team into top 25 consideration entering his first year on the job and gives them the high-level wing they were looking for.
Memphis had been optimistic it could get David Jones back for another year. Instead, the Tigers’ star wing elected to stay in the draft Wednesday afternoon, a significant hit to Memphis’s hopes of getting back to the NCAA tournament after missing the party in 2024. Jones averaged nearly 22 points per game a season ago, but struggled at the NBA draft combine and measured under 6'4", less-than-ideal size for a wing. He likely won’t be drafted higher than the late second round. Memphis has done a nice job in the portal, but replacing Jones’s production won’t be easy … especially this late in the cycle.
It always seemed like a long shot Kansas would retain talented freshman wing Johnny Furphy, but the Jayhawks were one of the few teams not to hold onto its stay-or-go pieces on decision day. Furphy’s stock seems to bounce somewhere between mid-to-late first round and early second round, but his meteoric rise as a prospect from playing in high school events last summer to being sure of his name being called on draft night this year is remarkable. Kansas, for what it’s worth, is still well-positioned with wing adds like Rylan Griffen and AJ Storr.
Furphy chose to stay in the NBA draft and is likely to be selected mid-to-late first round or early second round. / Ben Queen-USA TODAY Sports
The San Francisco program has been knocking on the door to break into the true top tier of the WCC. Its hopes of a breakthrough in 2024–25 took a hit when star forward Jonathan Mogbo stayed in the draft. Mogbo is a unique player, a point forward with elite athleticism who was the centerpiece of what San Francisco did on both ends. Replacing him, especially this late, is nearly impossible.
While draft decisions did provide clarity for a lot of teams and help round out some rosters, there are still some high-profile holes to fill around the country. And while, as expected, names like Coleman Hawkins and Ugonna Onyenso elected to stay in school and zoom in on portal options, a few big names like Cam Christie and Jaylen Wells decided to remain in the draft. Add in a few commitments coinciding with draft decisions like JT Toppin’s at Texas Tech and Baba Miller’s at Florida Atlantic, and the market of still-available players is a bit more depleted than expected heading into June.
Jalen Milroe doesn't want to discuss Michigan's sign-stealing scandal from the 2023 season. Alabama's quarterback was asked if he believed the Wolverines cheated and demurred, brushing the questions off and crediting them for winning the national championship. It was a textbook lesson in how to avoid making waves during an interview.
On Tuesday, Milroe was a guest on Barstool Sports' Bussin' With the Boys and was asked if he thought Michigan cheated. His replied, "Doesn't matter, they won."
Alabama QB Jalen Milroe was asked if Michigan cheated last season🤣
That is an incredibly savvy, well-handled response from Milroe. It's impressive.
Milroe led Alabama against Michigan in the semifinal of the College Football Playoffs. The sophomore famously came up just two yards short of tying the game in overtime, as Michigan stopped his quarterback sneak shy of the goal line. That gave the Wolverines a 27-20 win and a berth in the title game, where they trounced Washington 34-13.
Overall, Milroe performed well in his first year as the Crimson Tide's starter in 2023. He completed 65.8% of his passes for 2,834 yards, with 23 touchdowns, six interceptions, a passer rating of 172.2 and 531 yards and 12 touchdowns on the ground. His QBR of 80.5 ranked 13th nationally, and he earned second team All-SEC honors.
Milroe is returning under a new head coach in 2024, as Kalen DeBoer has taken over for Nick Saban. It will be fascinating how things change with a new staff and a new offense. Milroe has the inside track to start, but it's already clear he can handle the media responsibilities of a starting quarterback at Alabama.
