Expanding the College Football Playoff to 24 teams would wreck what made this sport worth loving, and it's happening anyway to chase another pile of television money. The people running college football know exactly what they're doing. Their own fans told them not to, and they're doing it anyway.
The number that should embarrass everyone in the room is 70. A survey from The Athletic found that 70% of college football fans oppose a 24-team playoff, with only 30% in favor. It's a landslide against expansion, and the response from the people in charge has been to reach a handshake agreement with ESPN to run the thing starting in 2027 anyway.
It's only a handshake agreement so far. There's still, in the sport's own words, a lot of work to be done on paper, and it needs board approval from every party involved. Nothing is final yet. But the direction is unmistakable: more games.
Nearly every report on the deal agrees the expanded format would eliminate the Power 4 conference championship games and push the season to start a week earlier. Think about what that erases. The SEC Championship Game drew 16.6 million viewers in 2024, and the 2025 Georgia-Alabama game averaged 16.86 million on ABC. That's one of the biggest regular-season properties ESPN owns, and the plan kills it so a committee ranking can hand out byes instead of letting a stadium full of people settle it on the field.
That's the trade. You give up a December Saturday that people actually show up for, in exchange for a bracket so big that finishing somewhere around the middle of your league gets you in. The regular season is the entire reason this sport feels different from every other one. Every September game carries weight because there's almost no margin. Widen the gate to 24 and you drain that tension out of the calendar on purpose.
The money explains it. ESPN already pays about $1.3 billion a year under the six-year, $7.8 billion deal struck in March 2024 that runs through 2031-32. Expansion adds an average of $345 million more a year for the next five years; CBS Sports put the added fee closer to $320 million. That's the price tag on burying Championship Saturday.
And this all comes barely two seasons after the field tripled from four teams to 12. The 12-team format is still being used for the 2026 season going on right now. The sport blew up its own tradition in 2024, and before anyone could even find out whether 12 works, it's lining up to triple the field again.
Name who's responsible. Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti pushed for 24 from the start. Fox, the majority owner of Big Ten Network, threw its weight behind 24 because it's the only format that shoves a dozen extra playoff games onto the open market where any network can bid. Greg Sankey initially wanted 16 and has since gone soft, saying at his league's basketball media days that the SEC is open to expanding and that a decision could come "probably sooner rather than later." The one commissioner who wanted something smaller folded, and that's the resistance collapsing.
ESPN may not have wanted this at all. The network could have felt cornered into a 24-team deal to protect its position and lock down future programming. That makes it worse. It means a format almost nobody asked for and most fans despise got forced through because the people with leverage, the Big Ten and the networks angling for those extra games, made it the price of doing business. ESPN writing the check under pressure doesn't absolve anyone. The fans were the last consideration on the list.
The details are still being fought over. Reports differ on whether it's 19 at-large bids with the Power 4 champions and the top Group of Six team getting in automatically, or 23 at-large spots with just one guaranteed Group of Six seat and no automatic bids for conference champions. Nobody can even agree on how the field fills. They know they want 24. They haven't settled who the 24 are.
The ratings didn't demand this. The first round of the 12-team playoff averaged 10.6 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and TNT in its 2024 debut. Year two dipped about 7%, to 9.9 million, and the drop got blamed on brutal NFL scheduling overlap. Fans weren't bored of playoff football. The product is healthy, and the appetite is there at 12. Nobody with a remote in their hand was begging for a dozen more games.
So spare me the pretense that 24 is about access or fairness or giving more kids a shot at a title. It's about $345 million a year and a dozen fresh broadcast windows. The fans said no by a two-to-one margin, and the people who run the sport looked at that number, looked at the other number with the dollar sign in front of it, and picked the dollar sign.
