There may be conflicts between the 18 Team Conference and the Historical/Rivalry Games. If you do want to realign into the 18 team super conference (or if you run into freezing between seasons) you'll need to remove any conflicting games from the historical list in the League Options screen to try and prevent the game from hanging.

This brings up a related question I had. I have not had time to test this in 2024 yet, but in 2023, our college league moves teams up and down to more/less prestigious conferences when they have very good/bad seasons. The problem this creates is that it seems that any realignment occurs AFTER the schedule is generated. Meaning that for example Arizona State and Oregon State switched places (the former to Mountain West and vice versa). The problem this created is that they still play the conference schedules for their old conferences. As a result, some MWC teams play 8 games, others play 7. Arizona State, now in MWC, has zero conference games. Maybe it's possible to time this differently but since we're on the topic, I thought I'd bring that up.

No, realignment happens during the new season stage. As soon as you advance past the new season is when the schedule is set.

With the sad demise of Pac-12 next year I do hope you in that upcoming game CF2025 will give us the shot of keeping this years setup of Conferences. It's so sad to see the +100y PAC dwindle down to 2 teams and maybe none.
I know you got several setups in todays game, but it would be nice to have this year avalaible as an easy to trigger setup with schedules, possible Bowl setups for PAC and everything. It will take many years before this onces Power conference comes back, if ever. The Power Five is down to Power Four but do give us the oppertunity to play this game as it was this last year of Power Five even in CF2025.
I'm sure the fantastic modders will do their best, but they need a foundation to stand on.