The College Football Playoff Is Expanding to 24 Teams and Killing Conference Championship Games: What It Means
The College Football Playoff will field 24 teams starting with the 2027 season, and the four Power 4 conference championship games will not exist. Both became official on Monday when the CFP Management Committee, the 10 FBS commissioners plus Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, voted unanimously to approve it.
The vote was decided the moment ESPN signed. The network agreed to pay nearly $1.7 billion over five years for the 12 additional games, on top of the roughly $1.3 billion a year it already pays. The 24-team cap is locked in through the 2031-32 season.
How the Field Works
Twenty-four teams, five automatic bids, 19 at-large. The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC champions are in. So is the highest-ranked team from the Group of Six, which is a team and not necessarily a champion. Notre Dame’s automatic top-12 clause is gone, so the Irish have to earn an at-large spot like everybody else.
Seeds one through eight get a bye and host in the second round. Seeds nine through 16 host seeds 17 through 24 in the first round. That puts 16 games on campus, up from four, running Thursday through Saturday. Quarterfinals and semifinals stay at the six bowl sites. Five rounds, 23 games, and a team that reaches the final without a bye plays 17 games, the same maximum as now.
The regular season still has 12 games. It just starts a week earlier, on August 28, 2027, and ends on Thanksgiving weekend, which gives every team a second open week. The Army-Navy game moves up to December 4, 2027, and the CFP has committed to not scheduling playoff games against it.
Greg Sankey Lost This Argument
The SEC commissioner spent most of 2026 insisting 16 was the right number. “The number of teams being 16 is still our focus,” he said in May, adding that “it’s incredibly important we maintain and continue to support the regular season.” He was the last holdout, and he folded.
What he gave up is the event his conference built its December identity on. The SEC Championship Game on December 5 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium will be the 35th and final edition. It started in 1992 at Legion Field with Alabama beating Florida 28-21. ESPN sources valued the game at roughly $80 million, and CBS Sports put the combined worth of the four Power 4 title games at close to $250 million.
Sankey’s statement called it “a defining event in college football for more than three decades.” The Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 all confirmed the same day that their championship games end after this season. Only the Big 12 has said how it will crown a champion without one, awarding its automatic bid to the regular-season winner. The other three are still working that out.
The Objections Are Not Quiet
Nick Saban went after it on the New Heights podcast. “Too many. There’s not 24 teams in the country that can win a National Championship,” he said. “So, what is the reason to actually do it? It’s about the money.” He also raised the workload question: “We played 15 games three times, and I thought that was too many games for college players to play.”
CFP executive director Rich Clark conceded that fans are against it and said the committee went ahead anyway. “We’re aware of the fan sentiment and that many fans aren’t in favor of expansion,” he said. “That was certainly weighed into the decision. It was considered.” And then: “But we decided to move forward with it.”
The Group of Six conferences have not announced whether their own championship games survive, and they get exactly one guaranteed spot out of 24. Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez said a vote among her peers would have backed a 16-team field “pretty easily.” That vote never happened.
Clark’s promise is that the committee will “make the 24-team Playoff spectacular for the fans.” The fans he is talking about did not ask for it, which he has already admitted.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
