Matt Hayes is right about the part everyone wants him to be wrong about: you will watch the 24-team College Football Playoff. You'll call it a money grab, you'll complain about four-loss teams getting a bracket slot, and you'll still sit down and watch a December mismatch on your television. He's also right that it's a terrible idea. Where he's too generous is the quiet assumption underneath the whole thing, the one the Big Ten and SEC are banking on: that your attention has no bottom and your loyalty doesn't either.
It does. There's a warning sitting in last season's numbers, and the people who signed this deal walked right past it.
On December 20, 2025, Oregon beat James Madison 51-34 in the first round. The Ducks had been something like a three-touchdown favorite before kickoff. The game drew 4.4 million viewers, the smallest CFP audience of any round on record. Six days later, Minnesota beat New Mexico in the Rate Bowl, a game with nothing on the line for anyone outside the two fan bases, and it also drew 4.4 million. A flagship playoff game pulled the same crowd as a bowl between an 8-5 team and a Group of Five opponent. That's what a mismatch does to a national audience. People can tell when a game decides something and when it doesn't.
Now run that math forward. The 24-team format, set to begin in 2027, opens with eight first-round games in the second week of December: the 9 seed hosting the 24, the 10 hosting the 23, on down the line. You already saw what the 5 against the 12 looked like. Multiply it. Most of those games will be blowouts between teams nobody outside two zip codes has an emotional stake in, and the reward for watching is the privilege of watching the good teams play two weeks later anyway.
A bigger bracket does hand more fan bases a live reason to care in December. A season where SMU or Memphis or Tulane can genuinely play its way in is a season where more games matter. True in theory. But a 24th seed getting steamrolled on the road is a formality, and the ratings already show fans treat it like one. Access you can't turn into a competitive game is just a longer undercard.
The Big Ten and SEC hold the authority over the format, and they're the ones who agreed to this deal. The Big Ten and SEC did this to college football. ESPN is paying for it, a five-year, $1.7 billion deal that also wipes out the Power 4 conference championship games. Tony Petitti and his counterparts looked at a product with a shrinking first-round audience and decided the fix was to triple the number of first-round games.
I've seen this movie. NASCAR introduced its playoff-style Chase in 2004 after polling its own fans, who rejected it, then shut down the polls and did it anyway. Within five years, attendance fell 22 percent and television viewership dropped 30 percent. The Cup Series averaged 7.85 million viewers a race in 2007; in 2025 it fell below 2.5 million for a full season for the first time. Nobody rage-quit in a single afternoon. They drifted. One diluted season at a time, the core fan decided there were better things to do, and the sport that was sure it owned them found out it didn't.
You'll watch the 24-team playoff. You'll watch the quarterfinals and the games that actually decide a champion. The Big Ten and SEC are gambling that you'll watch the other sixteen too. That's the bet that bankrupts people.
