Before kickoff next Saturday when Pitt opens its 2024 season against Kent State, tradition will prevail, and players — properly dressed in shirt and tie — will follow coach Pat Narduzzi into Acrisure Stadium.

Inside, more memories will be made over the course of the season, perhaps similar to M.J. Devonshire’s game-winning pick-6 against West Virginia in 2022 and Ryan Lewis’ end-zone interception that nailed down a victory against Penn State in 2016.

There will be disappointments, too, but all of it — good and bad — is what brings fans on both sides of stadiums from all over the U.S. back for more year after year, chasing the same thrills that attracted them to college football in the first place.

Yet college football doesn’t look the same.

For example:

• The ACC used to be a tidy, little league of seven South Atlantic schools when it was founded in 1953, but it has expanded from coast to coast into a 17-team conglomeration (18 for basketball). While Florida State was preparing to play Georgia Tech in Dublin, Ireland, on Saturday to start the season, the ACC’s footprint now includes Stanford, Cal-Berkeley and SMU and covers 24% of the 50 states.

• Overall, 12 power conference schools, plus SMU, have moved, with Southern Cal, UCLA, Oregon and Washington joining the Big Ten; Oklahoma and Texas finding new homes in the SEC; and Arizona State, Arizona, Utah and Colorado bumping the Big 12 up to 16 schools. Penn State plays Southern Cal on the west coast Oct. 12 for only the third time during the regular season and the first since 1991.

• Players receive payouts through their name, image and likeness that occasionally reach $1 million. Recruits play one school off against another to see who is willing to ante up the most money.

• Unhappy players or perhaps those just looking to get rich through NIL can transfer and play immediately at their new school.

There are many people who believe giving players such leverage and money is long overdue.

“I think in the long term, it gets us closer to a real business model that, frankly, needed to occur,” ESPN.com college football insider David Hale, who has been writing about the sport for 20 years, told TribLive. “You can’t have a sport generating billions upon billions of dollars every year and none of that is directly flowing to actual employees of the sport. This was inevitable, but there are going to be a lot of growing pains along the way.

“It’s problematic, certainly the amount of player movement and what the impacts are on graduation rates and academics. But I might be a bit naive to assume anybody cares about that anymore, anyway.”

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Yet there are troubling issues to consider, Hale said.

“We’re in an era of revenue sharing, and players basically getting what amounts to a direct salary from the school,” he said. “If that’s happening, how long until there’s a player who says, ‘Uh, I’m not going to play Saturday unless I can get another 50 grand, or something like that.’

“I can tell you I already am aware of numerous (situations) of guys who (say) ‘Here’s my NIL deal to come in in December. All right, at the end of spring practice, I’m going to need a new deal or else I’m going to go to the portal again. That’s already happening.

“So when does it happen on game day? Do we hear about it? Does it get reported as an injury or a suspension or something instead? Has it already happened? I think we would be naive to assume it’s not going to be an issue.”

Nonetheless, Hale said the games played out over 60 minutes on 100 yards of grass or turf remain largely the same.

“This is a personal opinion but largely validated by TV ratings or actual performance on the field: The quality of the games themselves have not really been impacted. There is perhaps some reason to think that more teams will be able to compete in a world in which money is the ultimate driver as opposed to a bunch of ancillary things that are designed to take the place of money, be it facilities or whatever people use in recruiting.”

For example, five-star offensive lineman Josh Petty said NIL “was a factor for sure” when he committed to Georgia Tech with a deal that will pay him $800,000 annually, according to Yahoo Sports.

“Georgia Tech wasn’t getting five-star O-linemen before,” Hale said. “There is something to be said about it opens the door to potentially allowing schools who do not have the best recruiting footprint or recruiting pedigree to add talent.

“You can make a good case that the portal has allowed players you might not have even known about or watched on a Saturday to transfer from the Kent States and Miami (Ohios) of the world to move up and play at a higher level. That’s good for the game.

“But there has to be a framework for it. Free agency and trades all work to make professional sports more fun and engaging and better. But there’s a framework to it. Not every player is a free agent every six months of every year. That’s currently how it works in college football. I do think that long term it will have a negative effect on the Saturdays. How obvious is that? How big is it? How noticeable? It’s hard to say.

“You have to be careful not to risk the things that make college football great on Saturdays by chasing all the dollars that may be out there.”

Chasing dollars is precisely what those 13 schools are doing, some in the name of survival.

ACC commissioner Jim Phillips was looking for strength in numbers when he recruited Stanford, Cal and SMU in the wake of Florida State and Clemson threatening to leave. Meanwhile, Stanford and Cal were looking to join a major conference and escape the sinking ship that is the Pac-12 after it lost all but two schools to the ACC, Big Ten and Big 12.

SMU was so eager to escape the American Athletic Conference, which it won last season, that athletic director Rick Hart, grandson of former Pitt coach Dave Hart (1966-68), agreed to forgo nine years of ACC TV money, about $24 million. Cal and Stanford will each start out receiving just a 30% share of ACC payouts.

But SMU and its wealthy stable of donors raised more than $200 million to offset those losses, according to Athletic Business.

On the field, SMU will add a quality team to the ACC. Quarterback Preston Stone threw for 3,197 yards and 28 touchdowns last season before suffering a broken fibula against Navy on Nov. 25. He missed the AAC title game victory against Tulane — the last of a nine-game winning streak that gave SMU its first conference championship since 1984.

“What I’m most excited for is the challenge that we’ll have as a team to have a heavyweight fight every single Saturday, show up the next week and get ready to do it again,” Stone said. “There really is no dropoff from the other teams in Texas that are really competitive to us. Now, we’re in a conference where we have the schedule to back that up. We’re jacked up for it.”

Cal’s Jaydn Ott may be one of the best running backs in the ACC after rushing for 1,375 yards and 12 touchdowns last season.

But Cal has logistical issues with four games on the east coast against Auburn, Florida State, Pitt and Wake Forest.

“Leave a day early,” coach Justin Wilcox said, “make sure you have plenty of food and water and Gatorade for the plane, and we got the biggest plane Delta makes, with lay-down suites. A lot of the players will have really comfortable seats, more comfortable than the chairs they sit in at home.”

Stanford will play at Syracuse and Clemson on consecutive weeks, Sept. 20 and 28, but they won’t be spending the week on the east coast.

“We will turn back (after the Syracuse game) so our students can go to class,” Stanford coach Troy Taylor said. “There are harder things to overcome.”

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