Which brings us to the CFP, itself. Out of this grim regular season post-FBS madness arises the penultimate spectacle: a 64-team playoff starting in November that closes out the season across many weeks. The television and ticket revenues, plus the opportunity to brand two freaking months as “The Race To The Championship,” were too great for the schools and the NCAA, respectively, to ignore.

With the addition of Notre Dame, Colorado State, Utah State, Boise State, BYU, UCF and Cincinnati to various POWER leagues, in 2024 69 teams exist across six leagues in the Verizon College Football Division presented by Taco Bell. Here’s how it beaks down:

SEC: 14 teams (unchanged from 2014)

ACC: 14 teams (unchanged from 2014)

Pac-14: 14 teams (Utah State and Colorado State added)

Big 12: 12 teams (BYU and Boise State added)

Big Ten: 14 teams (unchanged from 2014)

Notre Dame Conference: 1 team (no teams added, it has always and only consisted of the way, the truth, the light: Notre Dame).

With the Papa John’s Division teams playing in what may as well be a different universe, regular season non-conference games no longer exist. Gone are the days of $900,000 payouts to Idaho and guaranteed wins for POWER programs.

Instead, in 2024, every POWER team plays nine regular-season games over the course of 10 weeks, all within its own conference. This transpires from Labor Day weekend through the first weekend in November. Each team plays four home games, four road games, and — so as not to give some teams more home games than others — one neutral-site game usually toward the beginning of the season.

After Week 10, conference championships are awarded to the team with the best regular-season record in each conference, while the worst team by record from each of the six conferences is automatically eliminated from the CFP before it even starts. This means there are tiebreakers for first place and last place. This holds true for every conference except the Notre Dame Conference, because Notre Dame, as the only team in its conference, automatically wins it the conference every year, and therefore can never finish last, because it always finishes first. The elimination of five teams cuts the number of eligible teams in the division to 64, which happens to be the perfect number for bracket-based mayhem.

Each week of the season starting after Week Five, the committee unveils its 1–69 rankings, which eventually determine the tournament’s seeding. This is still the Tuesday night ESPN primetime spectacle that it used to be back in 2014, only bigger, with Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit and — inexplicably — Stephen A. Smith reporting live from Fort Knox. Yes, several years back the committee ditched the Gaylord Dallas in favor Fort God Damned Knox (Sources: it was Romney’s idea). It’s a big optics problem for ESPN. Not even Stephen A. can make passionate conversation with a limp orange windsock in a large plot of grass.

The Tuesday night after Week 10 is the committee’s and ESPN’s coup de grace: a full two-hour bracket release where fireworks erupt and illuminate American flags against the din of a Kentucky sunset. “The Heart of the Matter” simulcasts an eight-hour, morning-after call-in show during which the bleep button is put to swift use and Rinaldi uses dulcet tones to remind more sensitive listeners that several callers annually have had to be institutionalized.

There’s a much-needed Division-wide bye week during the second weekend in November. This is the one weekend in the Fall where it’s OK for people to schedule weddings and remote camping trips. This is followed by the trickle-out in primetime of the CFP’s first-round games starting Wednesday and leading into the third weekend in November. This marks, if not the apex, at least the start of the manic period, similar to the first two rounds of the NCAA Basketball Tournament each March. For the first three rounds, higher-seeded teams host lower-seeded ones.