We’ve watched the College Football Playoff triple in size once already, from four teams to twelve, and we’re still not done arguing about what that did to the sport. Now, two years and three actual playoffs later, it’s about to double again. The field goes from 12 teams to 24 starting with the 2027 season, and the part everyone keeps skipping past is what has to die to make room for it: Power 4 conference championship games, some of the only single-elimination football left on the regular-season calendar.
The deal isn’t signed. ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported the sides are closing in on it, not that they’ve closed it, and the exact shape still has room to move before 2027 kicks off. Yahoo Sports laid out the structure as reported: four Power 4 conference champions, one Group of Six champion, and something like 19 at-large bids rounding out the field to 24 (that number isn’t locked, and outlets don’t fully agree on it, so treat it as a working figure, not a fact). The top eight seeds get byes. The other sixteen play eight win-or-go-home games to get in, with the first two rounds on campus and the championship set for January 24, 2028, in New Orleans.
Conference championship Saturday, for all its flaws, is genuinely high-stakes football: a single loss ends a team’s best path to the playoff. That’s the actual trade nobody’s naming out loud. Replace that round with an at-large bid system and a 9-vs-24 play-in game, and the stakes don’t vanish so much as relocate, from games that already mattered to a round built mostly to justify a bigger bracket. A 9-seed hosting a 24-seed in the first round of a 24-team field is not appointment viewing. It’s inventory.
And inventory is the word that actually explains the timing. SI’s breakdown notes ESPN is finalizing a rights deal for the expanded playoff (23 total postseason games) running through 2031, the same end date as ESPN’s existing CFP contract. That’s the detail that reframes everything else. The 12-team format never got evaluated on its own competitive merits. It got replaced after three seasons because a bigger number became available, and once this new deal is signed, the sport’s power brokers are protected from having to make that reckoning again until the back half of the decade. They didn’t fix the format. They bought themselves five years of not having to.
ESPN previewed the move last week:
https://twitter.com/espn/status/2110789248123072648
The commissioners aren’t unified on it, which matters. Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 leadership are on board. The SEC has been the holdout, though commissioner Greg Sankey has been signaling movement as of this month. Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti made the case for expansion in blunt institutional terms: “We’re up against some older traditions,” he said. “College football’s the last place where every team in the postseason has to be a stone-cold lock, legit chance to win the championship. And that’s not the way playoffs work in every other sport, including the NCAA.” It’s a fair point about format, and a non-answer about why this particular bigger format, on this particular timeline, attached to this particular network’s money.
The access argument isn’t nothing, either. The 12-team era, two seasons in, has already produced three Group of Five playoff qualifiers. That’s three times the total non-power representation of the entire 10-year, four-team era that preceded it. That’s real, and it’s worth defending. But access without quality control has a cost too, and the most recent bracket already shows the strain: Indiana won its two games before the title game by a combined 69 points, 56-22 over Oregon and 38-3 over Alabama, before the championship itself actually came down to six. A good team and a historically dominant one can both qualify for a 12-team field. Stretch it to 24, and the gap between the No. 1 seed and whoever squeaks in at 24 only gets wider.
Danny Kanell has made himself the face of the pro-expansion side, and he’s doing it with his eyes open about how unpopular that makes him. He posted his reaction this week:
https://twitter.com/dannykanell/status/2110801249071448314
Kanell’s framing is that a 24-team playoff game, even a lopsided one, beats a bowl season gutted by the transfer portal. He’d rather watch Iowa-Miami than the Outback Bowl playing out with half its rosters already gone. That’s not a crazy position (something we flagged two weeks ago, when the negotiating window on this deal first opened, and the bowl system’s decline was already part of that story). Kanell has also framed the opposition as nostalgia: people who grew up in the ’90s, SEC fans who miss their old scheduling monopoly, media voices protecting inventory they used to control. Some of that lands. Not all of it. Barrett Sallee pushed back along more familiar lines. His position has long been that this format trades excellence for access, and he said as much again this week:
https://twitter.com/BarrettSallee/status/2110796772079493235
I think Kanell is right about two things: access matters, and the bowl season has been hollowed out by the transfer portal — both true, neither controversial. I think he’s wrong about why this particular expansion is landing on this particular timeline, attached to this exact rights number, locked through 2031. A podcast poll this week found 70% of college football fans oppose the 24-team move against 30% in favor, a split columnist Stewart Mandel compared to the approval rating on New Coke. People can feel the difference between a format getting better and a format getting bigger for someone else’s benefit, even when they can’t always name which reform they’d pick instead.
The stated justification, the one commissioners actually use in meetings, is that the “lower 45” Power 4 programs (the ones outside the handful of annual contenders) need a realistic postseason path to justify the $20-40 million a year they’re now spending on rosters in the revenue-share era. That’s a real problem. It’s just not the same problem a bigger bracket solves. A 24-team field gives those programs a plausible shot at a play-in loss, not a plausible shot at a title, and conference championship Saturday was a cleaner test of whether they belonged in the conversation in the first place.
What to watch between now and whenever this gets finalized: whether Sankey’s SEC actually signs off or extracts something in return, whether the at-large number settles at 19 or moves, and whether anyone in the room revisits the 12-team format’s merits before it’s formally retired. I wouldn’t bet on that last one. The lesson the sport just taught itself isn’t “evaluate before you expand.” It’s “lock in the next deal fast enough that nobody gets the chance to ask.”
