Will the College Football Playoff Expand to 24 Teams? Inside the ESPN Negotiating Window
The College Football Playoff opened media rights discussions with ESPN on Tuesday, and the number on the table is 24 teams.
That is not a typo. Twenty-four. Double the current 12-team field.
The CFP triggered a 30-day negotiating window with ESPN to sort out the financial side of a possible expansion. There is a hard deadline of December 1 to decide whether the format changes for the 2027 season. Opening talks does not mean expansion is happening, but nobody spends 30 days negotiating something they have no interest in doing.
The money context matters here. The current CFP deal with ESPN, which starts this season, is worth $7.8 billion over six years. ESPN stays the sole rights holder as long as the field is 12 or 14 teams. Go past 14 and ESPN only holds an exclusive first negotiation right on the additional games, which is why this conversation is happening now instead of quietly in a boardroom next spring.
The conference politics are messy. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has pushed for 16. The Big Ten floated 24 first and still backs it, and the Big 12 and ACC are on board with that scenario. Fox has signaled it likes 24 too, which is the tell. A second network wanting in changes the leverage completely.
So here is my stance, and I am not going to soften it: 24 teams is a bad idea and the CFP should not do it.
Twelve was already a stretch. The bracket got its first round, the regular season kept most of its weight, and the sport found a workable middle ground between the old two-team absurdity and total dilution. It has barely had time to breathe.
Twenty-four teams means letting in three-loss and four-loss programs. It means a November game between two 7-4 teams suddenly carries playoff implications, which sounds fun until you realize what it costs. The reason college football’s regular season has been the best regular season in American sports is that losses actually end things. A September upset used to reshape the entire year. At 24 teams, it becomes a minor inconvenience.
There is also a practical problem nobody wants to say out loud. Those extra games are not worth much. The whole calculation embedded in these negotiations is how much any broadcaster would pay for games involving teams that do not draw ratings. A first-round matchup between the 22 seed and the 11 seed is not appointment television. It is inventory.
And the players are the ones absorbing it. A 24-team bracket means the eventual champion could play five postseason games on top of a 12-game regular season and a conference title game. That is an 18-game season for unpaid-in-the-traditional-sense athletes who are already stretched across a calendar with no real offseason.
What should happen instead? Stay at 12 for at least three more cycles and actually study the data. If the committee truly believes deserving teams are being left out, 14 is a defensible compromise and it keeps ESPN as the sole rights holder, which preserves the clean broadcast structure.
The honest reason 24 is on the table is that the Big Ten and Big 12 want more automatic bids for their own members and more television money flowing through their conferences. This is a revenue negotiation dressed up as a fairness argument.
December 1 is the date to watch. I expect the CFP to blink and land somewhere between 14 and 16, because Sankey has a lot of pull and the SEC has never lost one of these fights.
If they go to 24, they will have traded the sport’s best feature for a bigger check. That is a deal they cannot undo.
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.
