The new 24-team College Football Playoff isn't fair to the Group of Six, and anybody selling the bigger bracket as a win for access is handing you a press release and hoping you don't count the seats.
Look at the math the Power Four would rather you skim past. Four automatic bids go to the four Power Four champions, one from the ACC, one from the Big Ten, one from the Big 12, one from the SEC. One automatic bid goes to the highest-ranked team out of the American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12 and Sun Belt combined. The other nineteen are at-large spots handed out by the CFP selection committee off its final rankings. That's it. Six conferences share a single guarantee. Everyone else fights over the rest using a ranking process that has never been kind to teams outside the power leagues.
Call it "19 at-large bids based on CFP rankings" and it sounds like a free-for-all. The same committee that filled the 12-team field's at-large slots almost entirely with power-conference teams is the committee filling these nineteen, and nothing in this deal changes the criteria it uses. Expanding the pool doesn't expand the Group of Six's odds when the pool is judged by the same people with the same preferences. One conference gets to call itself represented by rule. The other six get to hope.
Now line that up against what the Power Four just did to the thing that used to force them to earn it. The SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 are ending their conference championship games after this season, and ESPN is reportedly paying them around $140 million for the title games it had rights to across the ACC, SEC and Big 12. The sport's richest leagues get to retire their championship weekend with a nine-figure check in hand. As of Monday's announcement, none of the Group of Six conferences had even decided whether they keep their own title games. So the leagues scrapping for one guaranteed spot are still sorting out whether their champion has to survive an extra Saturday, while the leagues that already run the committee's math cashed out of theirs. If that split wasn't designed to favor the people holding the pen, it sure worked out that way for them.
ESPN didn't build this shape. Two years of Power Four commissioners negotiating against each other did, with the Group of Six traded around in the deal, never a party in the room. Tony Petitti and the Big Ten pushed hardest for a model that scaled bids to conference size, floating a 28-team version that would have given the Big Ten and the SEC seven automatic bids apiece and the ACC and Big 12 five each. The ACC and Big 12 refused that math. The SEC eventually backed something flatter. What got approved Monday is flatter still: one bid per Power Four champion, one for the best Group of Six team, nineteen for the committee. The "fairness" being advertised is fairness between the Big Ten and the SEC. It was never a negotiation about the Group of Six's share.
The counterargument: capping the Group of Six at one automatic bid makes every one of those conference races matter more, because the whole season turns into an elimination bracket for a single ticket. That's true, but raising the stakes of a race for one seat doesn't make it fair when four other leagues get four bids, no strings attached, and then get first crack at nineteen more. High stakes and a rigged distribution can coexist in the same format, and they do here.
The format does get one thing right. A guaranteed Group of Six bid beats some of the proposals that floated this cycle, where the smaller leagues got squeezed out entirely. It's one more shot at relevance than those programs had any reason to expect from a process the power conferences control. Even Notre Dame walks away without a guarantee this time and has to run through the at-large pool like everyone else. The expansion counts for something.
Being better than the worst option on the table doesn't make this fair. This is a five-year, roughly $1.7 billion deal that locks in 24 teams through the 2031-32 season, and for all five of those years the structure is the same: four conferences split four guaranteed bids, six conferences split one, and the other nineteen run through a committee whose track record on ranking Group of Six teams hasn't moved an inch. The bracket got twice as big, but the gate stayed exactly as narrow as it always was.
