The defining characteristic of the 2024 college football season to date? Parity at the top. We head into the postseason with eight teams separated by just 3.1 points atop the SP+ rankings. This year's top team in SP+ would have ranked fourth in 2023 and fifth in 2022.
It's a hell of a time to expand the College Football Playoff, then! Six of those eight barely separated teams made the first-ever 12-team CFP field, and per SP+ no one starts out with a better than 20.4% title chance. With three or four games remaining, this year's champion still has time to separate itself from the pack, but for now the 2024 season appears unlikely to produce one of the best teams of the CFP era.