It had been the summer of doom and gloom for college football fans. First the transfer portal was going to kill off the sport. Then NIL. And then, most certainly, super-conferences. Rip up your season tickets, Virginia Tech fans. Skip Homecoming, Iowa State fans. Because if your team is not in the Big Ten or SEC by 2024, it might as well close up shop.

But then, lo and behold, on the Friday before the unofficial last weekend of summer, the 11 university presidents who oversee the College Football Playoff went and threw the 99 FBS programs not in or headed to those two conferences a big fat life preserver.

It took a long, winding and frankly bizarre process to get there, but a 12-team College Football Playoff is officially coming, possibly as soon as 2024, but no later than 2026. And the news couldn’t come at a better time for conferences like the Big 12, Pac-12 and ACC — the latter two run by commissioners who inexplicably voted against it last winter.

After the commissioners failed to reach an agreement following eight months of meetings, the exasperated presidents effectively said, “Thanks, we’ll handle it from here.” Multiple sources told The Athletic that a small subset of presidents, led by Mississippi State’s Mark Keenum and West Virginia’s Gordon Gee, had been holding informal discussions for several months.

The model they approved Friday was virtually unchanged from a working group’s initial proposal in June 2021. The six highest-ranked conference champions and six highest-ranked at-large teams will still get invited.

You read that right. SIX conferences are guaranteed access to the Big Dance. Not two.

Every current Power 5 league plus at least one Group of 5 conference will remain nationally relevant right up through the last week of the regular season, regardless of how many billions less they might make than the Big Ten or SEC.

“It’s clear that there is a ‘P2,’ and I’ve used that term before and the media is starting to use it, too,” AAC commissioner Mike Aresco said Friday. “I think with that kind of consolidation, everyone is realizing that it is important to have (CFP) access.”