The College Football Playoff doubles to 24 teams next season

The College Football Playoff will double to 24 teams next season under a five-year, $1.7 billion expansion deal announced Monday.

The agreement between the playoff and ESPN keeps the network as the sole rights holder through the 2031 season and takes effect for the 2027 season. ESPN pays an additional $1.7 billion over five years on top of the $7.8 billion contract it signed in March 2024, the Associated Press reported.

The move is the second expansion since the playoff began as a four-team event in 2014, and it rewrites the calendar that has governed the sport for decades. It ends the Power Four conference championship games, pushes the regular season from the week before Labor Day through Thanksgiving weekend, and admits about one-third of the 68 Power Four teams to a field picked by committee.

The 24-team field will include the four Power Four conference champions, the highest-ranked Group of Six team, and 19 at-large bids chosen by the selection committee, ESPN reported. The top eight seeds receive first-round byes, and the first two rounds are played on the campus of the higher seed. The first national championship under the new format is set for Jan. 24, 2028, in New Orleans.

Money settled the holdout. The Power Four conferences earned an estimated $345 million a year from television rights to their championship games, the AP reported. Canceling those games returns about $140 million a year to ESPN and roughly $50 million to Fox, which owned the Big Ten title game, ESPN’s Heather Dinich reported.

The SEC championship game alone was valued around $80 million, Dinich reported. The Big Ten pushed for 24 teams and circulated a plan last February, while the SEC preferred 16 and balked at losing the title game it invented in 1992, the AP reported. ESPN’s extra payment covered the gap, and the management committee, made up of the 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, voted unanimously for the field, ESPN reported.

The new calendar moves the Army-Navy game to Dec. 4, 2027, the Saturday once reserved for conference title games, at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, Dinich reported. The playoff begins Dec. 9, 2027, with eight first-round games, followed by eight second-round games, quarterfinals on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, semifinals Jan. 13-14, 2028, and the title game Jan. 24. The Heisman Trophy ceremony moves to the first weekend of December alongside Army-Navy.

The deal sets scheduling standards. Power Four schools must play at least 10 regular-season games against conference opponents, other Power Four teams, and Notre Dame, while Group of Six teams must play 10 games against conference opponents, the AP reported. The committee will count only one win over an FCS opponent per season, Dinich reported.

Notre Dame loses the guarantee it had this season, when a top-12 ranking earned a bid. Coach Marcus Freeman called the change a net positive: “I don’t want this to be like March Madness and have 60-something teams making the playoff,” he told the AP. “But the more opportunities we have to make the playoff, it helps us.”

Traditional bowls will still host the quarterfinals and semifinals. Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli said the “vast majority” of bowl-eligible teams still would not make the playoff, Dinich reported. One Power Four source told ESPN the remaining pool would be “diluted for sure.”

Skeptics see a diluted regular season. The AP noted that a 13 seed versus a 20 seed could pair Kentucky against South Carolina in place of an Alabama-Georgia title game, and ESPN senior vice president Nick Dawson conceded the effect is unknown: “In all honesty, it’s impossible to know for sure,” he said on a conference call.

Critics point to the selection committee’s record. The committee left out Florida State in 2023 and Notre Dame last season, the AP reported, and a 24-team field asks the same group to rank teams 16 through 24, a range Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti called “virtually impossible” to decipher fairly, Dinich reported.

Petitti has argued that “tiered incentives” keep November meaningful, because teams seeded ninth through 16th host first-round games and teams at the bottom fight to stay in the field, Dinich reported. “We really like adding 12 more home games for the sport,” he said.

CFP executive director Rich Clark said the committee voted unanimously knowing fans were skeptical. “We’re aware of the fan sentiment and that many fans aren’t in favor of expansion, but that was certainly weighed into the decision and it was considered,” he told ESPN.

Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin backed the change. “When there’s 68 Power 4 teams and Notre Dame and there’s 11 spots for them right now, you couldn’t find a sport in our country that has that few opportunities for postseason play,” he told ESPN.

Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell was more guarded. “If they think it’s a good thing for college football, then I’ve got to believe that this is the route we’re headed, and we’re going to make it a great thing for college football,” he told the AP.

Not everyone in the press box is convinced. ESPN’s Bill Connelly wrote that the sport is “going from handing out 15-20 mulligans per year to 45-50,” and that the new bids go “almost exclusively” to programs that “have long since rigged the game in their favor,” he wrote. He noted that if a 24-team field had existed since 2014, 80 different teams would have reached it at least once.

What I think

The field is too big, and the commissioners who approved it know fans agree.

A 24-team playoff admits three-loss Power Four teams and asks a selection committee that whiffed on Florida State in 2023 to rank the 24th-best team in the country. The regular season built this sport, and this deal trades some of its weight for 12 extra first-round games between teams that would not have contended before. ESPN pays, the conferences keep the money, and the Group of Six gets one guaranteed bid while its other champions watch from home.

I don’t believe more bids will produce a better nonconference schedule. Athletic directors said the same thing before the four-team and 12-team playoffs, and the soft September wins stayed. The 10-game Power Four requirement helps, but it also crowds out the Group of Six programs that most need a marquee opponent.

The playoff will draw ratings, and I will watch it. A sport that once gave its title to polls and bowls now gives it to a committee and a television contract, and the people who profit from that just voted to make it bigger.