SEC football teams and the post-Four Team Playoff world

College football has 134, FBS teams that can aspire to post-season play in the 2024 season. A whopping 82 of them will be rewarded with at least one extra game. Through the eyes of Alabama Crimson Tide fans, college football is now a post-Nick Saban world. It is easy to think college football without Saban will never be the same.

The bigger change for the 2024 season has nothing to do with Nick Saban. It can be defined as the post-Four Team Playoff world. What comes with the expanded field is a new, more precise dividing point in college football; Playoff teams and everyone else.

When the 12-team field is announced in December, those 'haves' will be joined by two to four teams with some credible claim they should have been in the field. That will leave around 118 teams for which 'losers' will not be an unfair description. Among the few teams just short of making the Playoff field, some will choose to play the aggrieved party. Florida State has provided a lesson on such a problematic strategy. Whatever the chosen spin, Power Four pretender teams who come up short will be badly damaged. Possible candidates are Penn State, Miami, FSU, Clemson, USC, Utah, Oklahoma State, LSU, Tennessee, Ole Miss and Missouri.

The pretenders and other bowl-eligible teams will be relegated to one of the 35 mostly meaningless bowl games. How meaningless you ask? Any teams stuck playing in Shreveport, Montgomery, El Paso, and other boring locations. Add in the bowl games that become jokes because of opt-out attrition, as in last year's Orange Bowl Game.

The teams not making the Playoffs have a far worse problem than a lousy bowl game. How can those programs spin a 'trending up' tale for the next season? Some coaches will fail to make a credible argument and a few of them will likely be fired. The firings will allow programs to spin new yarns that the new guy will orchestrate a quick turnaround.

What about non-Playoff SEC football teams?

If the ESPN FPI predictions are right, Arkansas, Mississippi State, and Vanderbilt will not become bowl-eligible teams. Sam Pittman and Clark Lea will probably get the axe.

LSU, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missouri and Texas A&M are included in many CFB Playoff predictions. However, it is not hard to find bowl game predictions that include each one of those SEC teams as a non-Playoff team. Coming up short would not severely damage the Texas A&M and Missouri programs. Oklahoma might be in a similar able-to-recover position. A different situation would befall non-Playoff status for LSU, Ole Miss, and Tennessee. At the least, considerable upward momentum by the programs would be lost. The three coaches would survive; but would have to battle for recruits and transfers as also-rans. That's college football's new reality.