Former Alabama head coach Nick Saban is high on Notre Dame heading into the 2024 college football season

It’s a new era of college football, and a new era of College Gameday. The show kicked off for another season this morning, welcoming the masses to Week Zero of the 2024 season. The big game of the week is Florida State taking on Georgia Tech in Dublin.

A part of the conversation, the crew did some bigger predictions for the 2024 season and the potential playoff teams. That included former Alabama head coach Nick Saban, who made his show debut. He dropped his personal 12-team playoff ranking.

It included Notre Dame in the tenth spot, which is a positive from a baseline perspective. It is a little lower than some have been projecting, seeing the Irish most commonly at No. 5 on expert lists this preseason. Being in that slot is a big positive, bringing an easily navigable road to Kane a deeper playoff run.

If the Irish did land at No. 10, they would be ironically enough matched up against the Alabama Crimson Tide . In this hypothetical, that would be must watch television. The Crimson Tide would be one of five SEC schools projected to join the field, along with Georgia , Texas , Ole Miss , and LSU .

With Notre Dame’s partial allegiance to the ACC, it was interesting to see that Coach Saban had Florida State as the conference champion. They were the only ACC school to make the field, the same with the Utah Utes out of the remade Big 12 conference.