At this point, a 24-team College Football Playoff has become the sports version of AI: Nobody asked for it, and almost nobody seems to actually like or want it, but decision-makers are very busy trying to convince you that it's inevitable whether or not anyone understands the implications.
Despite waves of negative reactions from media and fans alike at nearly every mention, Big Ten commissioner Tony Pettiti has been slowly building consensus for a 24-team CFP, and he seems to be inching toward success. ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, previously a skeptic, expressed support last week, and Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark is already on board. At this point, it appears the SEC's Greg Sankey is the only holdout. He recently -- and correctly -- called the idea of 24 an "unknown."
That's a key word. A 24-team playoff would fundamentally change a fan's relationship with the college football season in a way that no other recent changes have. With conferences' spring meetings kicking into gear, expect Pettiti's push to continue garnering headlines and move closer to perceived inevitability. But instead of simply accepting these changes as foregone conclusions, let's talk about the massive implications the switch would have and what could be done instead.
The push for 24
Expansion is the word of the day. The NCAA basketball tournaments were recently stretched to 76 teams, but that didn't structurally change much; it just added a few more games to the Tuesday/Wednesday docket of play-in games. That might change a fan's experience in filling out his or her bracket, and it certainly takes the marginalization of mid-majors even further, since many will be crammed into those play-in games. (It's not enough that the power conferences have arranged to hoard most of the new revenue in college sports. They have to hoard the access, too.) But the jewel of the March Madness experience is the fire-hose thrill ride of the first weekend of the tournament, and that won't look much different.
What's being discussed for football is a far more extensive expansion, a literal doubling of the size of the playoff. The Big Ten has been pushing for a 24-team playoff that would eliminate conference championship games and allow for no automatic qualifiers, aside from having one spot reserved for a Group of 6 team. In the interim, Pettiti has also proposed a temporary expansion to 16 teams -- not a normal, clean, four-round bracket, but a convoluted five-round bracket with two first-round byes.
There have been quite a few reasons expressed for why football must expand access so quickly. The most prominent one: The college sports industry needs the money. Since we're finally paying players -- and since we're doing so while continuing to allow coaches' salaries and buyouts to rapidly escalate -- athletic directors are desperate to increase revenue wherever possible. As Phillips said last week, "If you're going to ask presidents and chancellors and boards to continue to invest in their football programs, it's really important that they have hope, that they have an opportunity at the beginning of the season to get into the playoff." (He was, of course, referring to ACC presidents and chancellors. I'm betting he doesn't care all that much about presidents and chancellors of schools outside the Power 4.) Expanding the CFP from four to 12 teams added more than $700 million in annual college sports revenue, but everyone needs even more, and no one wants the boosters who are writing the big checks to feel unrewarded.
Beyond that, Petitti and others are trying to convince fans that, with a larger playoff, teams would be naturally encouraged to play more difficult and more interesting nonconference games. Plus, coaches really want an expanded playoff -- doesn't that make it a worthy pursuit?
Of course, part of the draw of big nonconference games is that they have consequences. Ohio State-Texas, the crown jewel of the 2025 and 2026 nonconference slates, would have had no playoff impact whatsoever with a 24-team field. Plus, we saw the same "it will encourage ambitious nonconference scheduling" rationale expressed when the CFP was created in the first place, and again when it was expanded to 12 teams.
In reality, expanding to 24 teams most likely would simply encourage more teams to schedule easy wins so they can get to 9-3 or so. If big-brand teams want to schedule big games -- and, therefore, sell more expensive tickets, excite their fan base and make their conference's TV package even more attractive -- they'll do it. If they don't, they won't. The size of the CFP won't have much to do with that.
And of course coaches want a bigger playoff! They want to be in it! That's no surprise!
The problem(s) with 24
In the early days of debates about the CFP (and its subsequent expansion), skeptics talked a lot about how a playoff would devalue the regular season. It was easy for proponents like myself to push back by simply pointing out that, although specific games in a given season would take on less meaning, a lot more would have added meaning.
We've seen that play out. Ohio State still won the national title in 2024 despite a devastating meltdown against Michigan -- an outcome that would have eliminated the Buckeyes from pretty much any title race before 2024 -- and although teams in the CFP averaged a combined 2.4 losses among them in the four-team CFP era (0.6 per team), that average has increased to 18.0 combined losses (1.5 per team) for teams in the 12-team CFP. But that has thus far been a worthy trade considering the breathless homestretch of the new regular season.
Based on how the CFP rankings looked the week before Championship Week in 2025 -- remember, conference title games would be eliminated in the 24-team model -- we would have been looking at something like this for a 2025 24-team CFP:
17 Virginia (10-2) at 16 USC (9-3) -- winner plays at 1 Ohio State (12-0)
24 North Texas (11-1) at 9 Alabama (10-2) -- winner plays at 8 Oklahoma (10-2)
21 Houston (9-3) at 12 Miami (10-2) -- winner plays at 5 Oregon (11-1)
20 Tulane (10-2) at 13 Texas (9-3) -- winner plays at 4 Texas Tech (11-1)
22 Georgia Tech (9-3) at 11 BYU (11-1) -- winner plays at 6 Ole Miss (11-1)
19 Michigan (9-3) at 14 Vanderbilt (10-2) -- winner plays at 3 Georgia (11-1)
23 Iowa (8-4) at 10 Notre Dame (10-2) -- winner plays at 7 Texas A&M (11-1)
18 Arizona (9-3) at 15 Utah (10-2) -- winner plays at 2 Indiana (12-0)
With this in mind, let's think about how Rivalry Week would have played out with a 24-team playoff and compare that with what happened with a 12-teamer.
• In real life, Michigan needed a miracle upset of Ohio State to have any playoff hope. Instead, the Wolverines lost by 18. With a 24-team CFP, they're comfortably in regardless.
• Alabama had to beat Auburn to keep its place in the CFP field and proceeded to blow a 17-point lead before rallying to win late. Meanwhile, Oklahoma needed to beat LSU to hold on to a berth and trailed with five minutes left before a late score. With a 24-teamer, both teams are comfortably in (and have opening-round home games) regardless.
• Texas and Vanderbilt needed to beat rivals Texas A&M and Tennessee, respectively, and hope for some chaos above them to get into the field. (They won, but they didn't get the chaos.) With a 24-teamer, they're both in regardless.
• In theory, No. 23 Georgia Tech facing Georgia could have had playoff stakes with a 24-teamer, but the committee actually boosted the Yellow Jackets in the rankings after another loss to the Dawgs. Turns out, they're in regardless.
• Only two rivalry games are enhanced by a 24-teamer: Arizona would have replaced Arizona State in the field with a 23-7 win in the Territorial Cup, and Virginia would have clinched both an ACC title and a CFP berth with a 27-7 win over Virginia Tech. Meanwhile, No. 19 Tennessee got beaten so badly by Vandy that the Vols would have fallen out -- resulting in some solid schadenfreude -- and No. 21 SMU would have fallen out with an upset loss to Cal. They're replaced by Iowa (which blew out Nebraska) and, in theory, North Texas (which blew out Temple).
(Why "in theory"? Because with the CFP committee's historic view of mid-major teams, I can't say it would be a surprise if the second-best Group of 6 team tended to rank no higher than 25th. The cynic in me says that Tennessee might have grabbed that last spot in the field instead.)
Now, the Territorial Cup is a spicy and underrated rivalry, and a field rush in Charlottesville would have been fun. But we're enhancing two or three games while diminishing five or six others, including some of the sport's most marquee annual matchups. And if we'd had a 24-team playoff the past two seasons, its teams would have averaged 46.0 combined losses, or just shy of two losses per team. Every time we add a certain percentage of teams, we end up with an even higher percentage of mulligans to tolerate.
Meanwhile, we'd be reducing a majority of conference title races to anticlimaxes: We would have ended up with four co-champions in the SEC and Mountain West, three in the American, two in the Big 12 and Conference USA and two 12-0 co-champs in the Big Ten. With no conference title games, only three conferences would have had solo champs.
I'm a big believer in rivalry games and the general college football experience. Your team's games are personal to you no matter what extra meaning they might or might not have to the rest of the world. Michigan's 2024 upset of Ohio State will always delight Michigan fans, after all. But a 24-team playoff with no conference title game stakes would drain most of the excess meaning from college football's biggest weekend. Maybe this is fine -- maybe we'll never lose interest or stop watching or take a week off here and there. But I don't really want to find out where the line is.
(The original version of Petitti's expansion idea, by the way, involved conferences having multiple automatic bids and using them to stage Championship Week play-in games. That would have certainly created dramatic value, but it would have made the entire playoff feel like a Big Ten-SEC invitational, and it would have turned every fun nonconference game -- one-quarter of the schedule -- into an exhibition. A poor trade.)
I also don't want to find out how Ohio State, Georgia or Alabama fans react to almost never having to play a meaningful regular-season game again. Ohio State has finished ranked in 23 of the past 24 seasons, Georgia has done so for 24 of the past 29, and Bama has done it for 18 straight. These teams might play games with genuine you're-in-or-out stakes only once a decade or so. I don't think we should understate the impact of that.
Case in point: North Dakota State just moved up to the FBS in part because fans were bored. When the Bison hosted Illinois State in the round of 16 of last year's FCS playoffs, the FargoDome was 44% empty. For a playoff game! Considering how much of the college sports economy is built around amazing football atmospheres and obscenely huge big-brand crowds, that's a glaring red flag. There's not another level for Ohio State to move up to, as there was for NDSU, and fans' boredom might only enhance all the superleague talk we've been dealing with for a while. (A college football superleague: an even more craven and potentially destructive idea than a 24-team CFP.)
Everything skeptics were wrong about with a four- or 12-team playoff, they'd be right about with 24 teams. This would fundamentally change the regular season in ways that a 12-teamer hasn't. Plus, although bowls have been diminished in the CFP era, they're still surviving -- millions of people watch them, and they're still producing delightful viral moments. Maybe bowls are unkillable, but removing the 13th- through 24th-ranked teams from the bowl pool would certainly create major dilution there, too.
Flex weeks: Who says we have to ditch conference title games, by the way?
Even if this runaway train is somehow slowed down, and the CFP either stays at 12 teams or limits its expansion to 16 -- with a clean, four-round bracket, not the five-round ridiculousness mentioned above -- there's no question that the current college football calendar needs adjusting. From the bracket reveal to the Jan. 19 title game, last year's 12-team CFP took 43 days. The next two years will somehow be even worse: The title game will be on Jan. 25 for the upcoming season and Jan. 24 for 2027-28.
Having a title game after the next semester has already begun, therefore forcing coaches to deal with an entire transfer cycle before the season has actually ended, is ridiculous. I might roll my eyes at coaches' preference for a large playoff, but they are totally correct in wanting a much faster end to the season.
The two primary methods proposed for speeding things up are: (a) starting the season on what is now Week 0, a full week before Labor Day, and (b) ditching conference title games, thereby lopping off the last week of the regular season. We also have to figure out where Army-Navy fits in all of this -- it deserves (and will continue to get) its own window in the college football calendar, but it is currently played in mid-December, which presents obvious logistical obstacles.
I don't have a major objection to the Week 0 idea, though it will cause some heat-related drawbacks. But I'm really struggling with the idea of ditching conference title games. First, for both playoff and pride reasons, those title races still matter quite a bit for every conference outside of the SEC and Big Ten. Winning a conference title game also probably means a lot to all but about three or four fan bases within the SEC and Big Ten, too, in a way that finishing in some four-way tie for first would not. Even with the ridiculous tiebreakers that are involved in this world of unwieldy megaconferences, getting rid of title games would be one more way to drain meaning from the end of the regular season.
It misses the heart of the issue, too: The problem isn't the title games; it's teams having to play a 13th game. So, let's get creative and make championship weekend everyone's 12th game. Let's live the flex week life.
Two sources of inspiration for this:
2020 Big Ten. During its COVID-delayed 2020 season, as it was hustling to fit as many games as possible in an abbreviated window, the Big Ten decided to have everyone play during Championship Week. The vision was to not only have the champions of the East and West divisions play for the Big Ten title, but also to have the second-place teams, third-place teams, etc., play as well. It was a fun idea undone only by positive COVID tests and cancellations.
2026 Pac-12. The redesigned Pac-12 will begin play this season with only eight teams, but it wants its teams to play a customary eight-game schedule. So, after its round-robin schedule has finished in Week 12, and the Pac-12 championship game has been set for Week 14, teams will play a flex week of designated rematches in between. The conference has announced four tentative matchups but has reserved the right to "adjust matchups based on the best interests of the league," be that to avoid a repeat of the conference title game pairing or, perhaps, to create a more favorable matchup for a possible CFP contender.
If the Pac-12 can manipulate its schedule to serve its purposes, why can't everyone else do that, too? Especially with every power conference soon playing nine-game conference schedules (more or less), why couldn't they play eight-game schedules, then determine a full slate of pairings -- including the conference title game -- for their final conference games? Wouldn't that be more exciting than simply ditching title games altogether?
We can use the 2025 SEC as an example. Avoiding rematches whenever possible and trying to set the most interesting possible stakes, here's what an SEC championship flex week might have looked like last fall. (Since everyone played four nonconference games instead of three, for the sake of ease we'll say each team dropped one of its easier nonconference games, and simply remove one win from everyone's record.)
SEC championship game: No. 3 Georgia (10-1) vs. No. 9 Alabama (9-2)
No. 13 Texas (8-3) at No. 6 Ole Miss (10-1)
No. 14 Vanderbilt (9-2) at No. 8 Oklahoma (9-2)
The SEC championship game remains the same, but for maximum CFP stakes (with a 12-team field), we can also create two approximate play-in games. Ole Miss is likely in even with a loss, but Texas and Vandy both have prime opportunities to play themselves into the field with big-time road wins. You could also be more self-serving and give borderline CFP teams likely wins against worse teams, but we're aiming for excitement here.
Tennessee (7-4) at No. 7 Texas A&M (10-1)
This would pit two higher-rated teams that didn't play each other. There might be too much of a risk here for A&M -- a loss could knock the Aggies from the CFP field -- but it's another quality matchup.
Mississippi State (4-7) at Auburn (4-7)
Florida (3-8) at Missouri (7-4)
Kentucky (4-7) at LSU (6-5)
Arkansas (1-10) at South Carolina (3-8)
I mean, they can't all be amazing matchups. But you still have at least one massive game for each window on Saturday.
The true draw of a flex week is, predictably, its flexibility. A conference can determine its priorities and feed them. There are flaws in any plan -- you could end up with three 8-0 teams in a more top-heavy conference like the Big Ten, and what exactly do you do about a conference with odd-numbered teams like the ACC? (I'd personally just make the last-place team in the ACC play at UConn.) But if part of the rationale of expanding to 24 teams is to create the TV revenue necessary to offset losing title games, flex weeks allow us to avoid that altogether.
Plus, with the way that the CFP committee has struggled to deal with the consequences of a team losing its title game -- Alabama, after all, got obliterated by Georgia last year but remained in the 12-team field because the committee didn't want to punish the Tide for qualifying for the title game -- this could potentially make its job a bit easier, too. The committee could definitely use the help.
Fans didn't ask for this
It is characteristic of modern sports that fans don't really have a say in anything. Ticket prices only rise over time, and television only becomes more of a driving factor. Fans weren't consulted during the massive rounds of recent conference realignment, but I'm not sure anything has ever taken fan sentiment less into account than the push for 24.
In a recent social media poll from On3, 79% of respondents expressed a desire for the playoff to either stay at 12 teams or expand to 16. The 24-team idea got 9% of support. Online polls obviously aren't worth much and are always conducive to grousing, but 79% to 9% is ... noticeable.
It's also noticeable how few schools might actually benefit from this.
I honestly understand the need for more money. Granted, it would be easier to sympathize if schools were capable of showing discipline with coach salaries, but no athletic director kept his or her job because of great financial discipline.
As I wrote a couple of years ago, the CFP's initial expansion could have funded the future of the sport for almost literally hundreds of schools in this new player-compensation era. Instead, most of that added money went to the Big Ten and SEC, conferences that ran the conversations and leveraged the fear of a superleague-style breakaway to their advantage.
This increasing skew in influence and revenue distribution has already had a major impact on the number of March Madness upsets over the past couple of years, something expansion will exacerbate. For millions of us, the upsets are by far the best part. But we're marginalizing a larger number of schools just to make sure power conference teams that are barely over .500 can get into the NCAA basketball tournament, and we're doing so after asking mid-majors to take on a disproportionate amount of the cost of last year's House settlement.
But hey, at least we're still inviting mid-major champs to the doorstep of the Big Dance in basketball. Creating a 24-team, FCS-style playoff that doesn't invite every conference champion might be the biggest insult yet.
The college sports industry has always been run by its most powerful and most self-interested parties to some degree, but never before have those parties been so cravenly focused on their own gains and so uninterested in fan sentiment or the overall college sports ecosystem.
Playoffs never get smaller either, by the way. There are no take-backs. This isn't a decision we should rush, but that's exactly what we're doing. A 24-team playoff, especially one that completely deemphasizes conference titles, would siphon off as much excess meaning as possible from the regular season. I love giant smaller-school playoff brackets, but the college football ecosystem isn't reliant on huge regular-season crowds and maximum attention in the lower divisions like it is for the FBS. (Now, if you craft a proposal that includes fairer revenue sharing and every FBS conference champion -- which you can do now that we've figured out a way to save title games! -- then that's suddenly a more intriguing trade. Hell, expand it to 28 if you have to.)
The money from the FBS regular season drives all of college sports, and minimizing its impact feels like a spectacular risk. Keeping the CFP at four rounds -- I love 12 teams, but 16 is fine, too -- and figuring out creative ways to keep conference title games should be the absolute focus at the moment. Worry about a fifth round when we've figured out how to do the best with four. And maybe also pause to figure out if fans even slightly want that.
We still haven't figured out how to ruin this sport, no matter how hard it seems like we're trying sometimes. We've allowed conference realignment to take away quite a few rivalry games. We've installed a CFP committee that makes truly baffling and inconsistent decisions and almost encourages conspiracy theories. We've allowed inequality to take hold to a degree that even college football, forever an unequal competition, has almost never seen. But a move to a 24-team playoff would represent the biggest change and, potentially, most blatant misunderstanding of the sport's roots yet. There are too many unknowns involved to rush something like this.
