ATLANTA >> A quarterback moving from Tulane to Duke doesn’t raise eyebrows. The $8 million that boosters at a basketball school paid for a football player does.

A veteran NFL coach finding a career lifeline at a college program that doesn’t win a lot shouldn’t surprise anyone. It does feel like a shock that the coach is Pro Football Hall of Fame-bound Bill Belichick.

Transactions nobody ever dreamed of became everyday occurrences this season in college football’s trip through the looking glass. Even so, one of the most tumultuous years in history will end with two schools whose traditions are as old as the game itself — Ohio State and Notre Dame — playing for a national championship.

Monday night’s final (even that’s a fairly novel concept for a sport defined by its bowl games for decades) will mark the latest finish to a season in college football’s 155-year history. It’s a product of the new 12-team playoff worth billions.

What comes after the game — with player payments, the transfer portal, tweaks to the playoff, Title IX issues and more — will determine how much wackiness persists next year and beyond.

“It’s a lot to consider, it’s a lot to try to navigate,” said Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman, who is the chair of the NCAA’s Division I policymaking board. “It’s hard, because you have a sense of what’s coming, but you don’t have as much clarity as you’d like.”

A quarterback’s journey tells a story no one could imagine five years ago >> What better way to illustrate these changing times than by telling the story of quarterback Darian Mensah.

He was a two-star recruit out of California in high school who got scholarship offers from three schools: San Jose State, Lindenwood (in Missouri) and Tulane. He chose Tulane and threw for 2,723 yards and 22 touchdowns. He kept the Green Wave in the College Football Playoff conversation through much of the year.

Then, in December, with the transfer portal open and players leaving their schools for better offers in droves, in swooped a third-party collective affiliated with Duke.

A school known for basketball was the landing place for a quarterback who will reportedly receive $8 million — a record, but one that probably will be broken soon.

“It’s a prestigious university, and a great education is also important to me,” Mensah said. “It’s just a family out here. I wanted to be part of that.”

That Duke family, never considered the cradle of quarterbacks, has nonetheless lost two starters to the portal in two years. One of them is Riley Leonard, who will start Monday in the final for Notre Dame.

College looks like the pros, so Belichick takes the leap to Carolina >> Perhaps an even bigger head-scratcher had to do not with a player but rather a coach.

Why would Bill Belichick, an out-of-work 72-year-old and owner six Super Bowl rings with the New England Patriots, give up on returning to the NFL to run a college program with scant tradition and coming off a soap opera-y firing of its coach, Mack Brown?

Well, Belichick’s dad coached there in the 1950s. And in his introductory news conference, Belichick insisted he’d always wanted to coach college ball. More enlightening was what he told Pat McAfee while the negotiations were ongoing: That college football was starting to look very much like the pros.

“It would be a professional program — training, nutrition, scheme, coaching, techniques — that would transfer to the NFL,” Belichick said.

All this change, but some things stay the same at the top >> All these players moving. All this budding talent showing up at places never known for football. It seems like any school can go from nothing into a college football powerhouse now, right?

Well, maybe not so fast. Even though the Southeastern Conference, which had won six of the last nine national titles, didn’t fare as well this year, Ohio State (five titles) and Notre Dame (11) are hardly new to this.

Some of the teams in the newly expanded playoff were not regulars — see Boise State, Indiana and Arizona State. But by the time the field had whittled to four, it was four traditional programs with national followings left standing: Penn State, Texas, the Buckeyes and the Fighting Irish.

“Everything is about recruitment and development and, now, retention,” said Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, reflecting on what it takes to stay at the top. “Every year you’ve got to start over now in college football. It’s not quite the NFL, but it’s getting close.”