College football's top 25 games of 2024: SEC, Big Ten showdowns headline biggest clashes of fall – 247Sports

The 2024 college football season comes with groundbreaking changes, and while the new-look sport will take some getting used to, perhaps the greatest benefit of conference realignment and College Football Playoff expansion is the enormous amount of high-profile games. Each of the power conferences will feature ranked-on-ranked battles on a near weekly basis, and with more teams in the playoff hunt late in the season, implications for November games from coast to coast will be tremendous.
Rivalry games, marvelous non-conference battles, new league showdowns and cross-country road trips headline the marquee games for the upcoming campaign, which will produce the most highly-tested national champion the sport has ever seen. The team that raises the CFP trophy will have endured as many as 17 games.
With the on-field product rising to an all-time high and the stakes becoming greater for more teams outside of the traditional national championship footprint, college football will be even more of a spectacle this fall than in years past.
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Here are the top 25 games of the 2024 college football season:
25. Miami at Florida
24. Florida State at Notre Dame
23. Notre Dame at USC
While it is a non-conference game with few league or College Football Playoff implications, the in-state rivalry showdown between Miami and Florida consistently received billing this offseason as perhaps the most important game of the 2024 season. Both programs are in prove-it mode with the Hurricanes needing to enter the CFP discussion with their immense talent stash and the Gators seeking to deliver a winning season against a brutal schedule. The loser of this matchup will have more than a few questions to answer the rest of the way.
22. Clemson vs. Georgia
21. Oklahoma at Missouri
20. Oklahoma at Ole Miss
Oklahoma’s games against Missouri, Ole Miss and Alabama are, for all intents and purposes, essentially the same contest. The Sooners have a brutal first-year draw in the SEC and have to play a quartet of potential top-10 teams, limiting their upside as a conference title contender. New starting quarterback Jackson Arnold will have his hands full with some of the best and fastest-rising defenses in the nation, but with promising transfer receiver Deion Burks alongside him, he could shine and lift OU to a couple of victories in these difficult spots.
19. Alabama at Oklahoma
18. Oklahoma State at Kansas State
17. Utah at Oklahoma State
Utah is arguably the Big 12 frontrunner in its debut season with the conference, but rising to the top of the crowded league will be no easy feat for the two-time Pac-12 champion — even with quarterback Cameron Rising and tight end Brant Kuithe healthy and back for their seventh years. One of the most fascinating matchups in the expanded conference is Oklahoma State running back Ollie Gordon against the Utes’ vaunted defensive front. The winner of that battle will likely reign supreme in a contest that figures to go a long way in determining the conference champion.
16. Clemson at Florida State
15. Tennessee at Georgia
14. Texas at Texas A&M
While conference realignment marked the end of numerous traditional rivalries, it also rekindles many dormant series. None are as heated as the Lone Star Showdown between Texas and Texas A&M. The revitalization of this rivalry already began on the baseball side when the Longhorns hired away Aggies coach Jim Schlossnagle, and new life reaches the football side Nov. 30 when the Longhorns travel to College Station. Kyle Field will be as raucous as ever when it hosts a sleeping giant in college football rivalry circles, and both teams promise to be in the final stages of a strong regular season.
13. Alabama at Tennessee
12. Alabama at LSU
11. Texas at Michigan
There is not a single non-conference game on the entire 2024 college football schedule more exciting than that between Michigan and Texas. These reigning playoff teams and preseason top-10 squads have conference and national title aspirations, and losing this Week 2 battle would be an early setback on that path and could make the margin for error extremely slim the rest of the way, even with CFP expansion taking effect this season. The Wolverines boast one of the nation’s top defenses and will have 100,000 fans behind them at the Big House, but Texas has some of the best skill position talent in the nation.
It has been some time since this in-state rivalry actually carried significant ACC title implications, but in 2024, Florida State and Miami meet in a regular-season battle that could be a preview of the conference championship game. The Seminoles reloaded admirably through the transfer portal, adding impact newcomers to all of the positions at which they lost NFL talent, and the Hurricanes have been even more successful on the recruiting trail over the last two years. The key is to put all of those pieces together, and the winner of this game will have a leg up on the other in the race for a CFP auto-bid.
Missouri was a surprise 10-win team last fall, but Eli Drinkwitz and the Tigers have everybody’s attention ahead of the 2024 season. This is a preseason top-10 squad, and while Mizzou undoubtedly earned that billing with its performance on the field last year, it has to prove its staying power before it clinches a spot in the playoff. Alabama is the exact kind of team the Tigers must beat in order to fully arrive at the top of the sport. Star wide receiver Luther Burden III could have a big day against a Crimson Tide defensive backfield that enters the year with a few question marks and plenty of youth.
One of college football’s premier rivalries moves to the SEC for its 2024 installment, and it carries conference championship implications right away. An Oklahoma victory would throw a significant wrench into the league race, whereas a Texas win would not only serve vengeance for the 2023 last-minute result but also put a huge feather in the Longhorns’ playoff cap. The Red River Rivalry is about as large of a spectacle as there is in college football, and the stage only gets bigger this season.
The Big Ten runs through reigning two-time champion Michigan until proven otherwise, but Oregon is on the verge of stepping past the Wolverines. This is a pivotal game for both teams, as the margin for error at the top of the 18-team league is extremely slim. Michigan’s home-field advantage is worth a great deal here, and its defense is one of the few in the land with enough talent to slow down the Ducks’ potent offense. This will either be a “welcome to the Big Ten” moment for Dan Lanning’s program or an opportunity to prove that Oregon has arrived in the national title conversation.
The first year of the Big Ten’s new era benefits Penn State greatly as the program misses some of the conference’s top contenders and no longer has to go directly through Michigan and Ohio State to reach league supremacy. The Nittany Lions do still have a showdown with the Buckeyes this year, though, and it looks to be even tougher than last year’s after Ryan Day loaded up on the recruiting trail, through the transfer portal and with his retention of numerous draft-eligible standouts.
Could 2024 mark a changing of the guards atop the SEC? Ole Miss hopes so, and it has a chance to take matters into its own hands when it goes head-to-head with the league’s perennial frontrunner. Lane Kiffin had one of the best offseasons of any coach with his transfer portal success, and he has the Rebels in uncharted waters ahead of what could be the best season in school history. Kirby Smart is the king of the new-look conference, though, and he will not let a program usurp Georgia from its throne atop the league without a brutal fight.
Some of college football’s biggest and most impactful games of the last five years came between Georgia and Alabama, and there are a few new faces in the battle to stand atop the SEC, the league still goes through these blue-blood programs. The Bulldogs will undoubtedly enter Bryant-Denny Stadium with additional motivation after the Crimson Tide defeated them last season in the conference championship game, keeping them out of the final four-team playoff. On the other side, this is an opportunity for Kalen DeBoer to notch an early signature win atop the Alabama program and vault his debut squad into the playoff.
The Game was, without question, the biggest showdown of the 2023 regular season and did not disappoint, as bitter rivals Michigan and Ohio State played to a one-score game. All of the pressure in the world is on the Buckeyes to snap their three-game losing skid in the monumental rivalry series, and this year’s roster looks more than capable of doing so, particularly with the Wolverines undergoing a transition on their roster and coaching staff. Michigan will still be squarely in the Big Ten and playoff discussions, though, and it clearly has its biggest foe’s number of late.
This could realistically be the first of three contests between the Big Ten frontrunners during the 2024 season. If both Ohio State and Oregon — college football’s buzziest teams this offseason — live up to their loftiest of expectations, they would almost certainly square off again in the conference title game and perhaps even in the CFP. Autzen Stadium plays host to the regular-season edition of this series when the Ducks welcome the Buckeyes for their biggest home game in quite some time. In all likelihood, both teams will be undefeated and ranked inside the national top five when they meet in Eugene.
Carson Beck versus Quinn Ewers is the best quarterback battle of the 2024 season. The Heisman Trophy frontrunners are not only the two most valuable players in the land, but they also stand atop two of the favorite teams to win the national championship. If this is only the first of multiple meetings between the Bulldogs and Longhorns, then college football is in for a treat. The winner will have a clear case for the No. 1 overall seed in the first 12-team playoff, especially if they take care of business in the rest of their regular-season outings.
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