For more than 50 years, we argued about it. Starting around 1960 with Northwestern athletic director Stu Holcomb's proposal for a "World Series" of college football -- six conference champions and the top two independents playing a three-round tournament, all finished by Jan. 1 -- the din of a playoff debate was never far in the distance. Because a lot of the most influential people in the college football industry (namely, bowl directors) benefited handsomely from the bowl system, we didn't get one until 2014.
College football long made a habit of moving far too slowly, be it toward a fair system for determining a national title or toward fairly compensating players. But now the gas pedal is stuck, and we're flying down the highway at ridiculous speeds. We cannot stop changing things. Conference realignment gave us supersized and geographically nonsensical conferences. We've gone from (legally) paying players $0 per year (plus educational benefits) to amassing over $40 million rosters. And starting in 2027, we'll have a playoff six times bigger than the one we got just 12 years ago. Unlike when that one came around, very few people were clamoring for this one.
According to ESPN's Pete Thamel and Heather Dinich, the College Football Playoff and ESPN are nearing a deal to expand the playoff in 2027. Whether any of us likes it or not, it's coming. Let's talk about why, what this changes and how it will impact the way we watch the game.
I've made it clear what I think about this
Back in May, when the push for 24-team inevitability got rolling, I shared plenty of thoughts on the matter. Some bullet points:
There are three main (and at least semi-legitimate) arguments I've seen for a 24-teamer. I just don't think they're good enough.
1. If we're rewarding more teams with playoff berths, it could tamp down a coaching carousel that seems to be getting crazier and louder. (There's a reason the only people I heard really arguing for a 24-teamer, before Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, were coaches.) Here's a reminder that Penn State fired James Franklin half a season after he came within about a minute of the national title game. It will take about two or three years for a coach to get fired after a first-round loss. Simply making the CFP will become less important every year.
2. When Petitti went on his PR campaign to win hearts and minds for 24, he emphasized that if teams have more margin for error, they'll schedule more exciting nonconference games. "We need to play more good games," he said. "We get the 24-team playoff, you're going to see many more competitive games scheduled. We'll commit to that." Of course, people said the same thing about a four- and 12-team playoff, and as it turned out, the motivation to simply schedule wins won out. It always will.
Beyond that, even if there is a shift in scheduling philosophy, it won't have a quick effect -- of the 34 teams in the Big Ten and SEC, 31 are booked up for 2027, 24 are full for 2028 and 14 are maxed out for 2029.
3. Finally, there's access. As plenty of people have noted, if a 24-team playoff had been installed in 2014, 80 different teams would have made it at least once in the past 12 seasons. Fair play: I've long shouted about the need for better access to a playoff, and this is access. But it's almost exclusively going to be access for programs from conferences that have long since rigged the game in their favor. When the World Cup expanded, it gave the vast majority of new bids to what you might call soccer's underserved populations. They were rewarded with a bounty of magical underdog stories. If Petitti were in charge of World Cup expansion, he'd have given 36 of the 48 World Cup bids to European teams.
Simulating the past 5 years
To get the best feel for what we're getting ourselves into, I've found it's best to look into the past. Here are what the past five CFPs would have looked like had they all been 24-teamers drawn from the end-of-regular-season CFP rankings.
With Covid-era eligibility oddities, fluctuating depth charts and all sorts of other things, we'd have gotten quite a few mid-majors into the 2021 field, led by unbeaten Cincinnati. But with Georgia comfortably the best team in the country, the Bulldogs would have had a 46% chance of still winning the title, per SP+, followed by Alabama (18%) and Ohio State (16%). Sixteen of 24 teams would have been under 1%.
With no conference title game, Lincoln Riley's USC Trojans would have fooled everyone into thinking they're contenders all the way to the 2022 playoff, when they'd have likely lost to Texas or a torrid Florida State in the second round. The mid-major bids would have dried up a bit, with only two Group of 5 teams reaching the field, and Georgia (33%), Alabama (19%), Michigan (18%) and Ohio State (16%) entering the CFP with decent title odds, per SP+. Seventeen of 24 teams, including USC, would have been under 1%.
Per SP+, Michigan and Georgia (which poetically got upset by Nick Saban's last Alabama team in the SEC championship game in real life) were by far the two best teams in the country in 2023, and they would have entered as title favorites -- UGA at 28%, per SP+, and Michigan at 25%. Oregon (13%) and Ohio state (11%) would have led the next rung of contenders. And hey, with more than four teams in the field, unbeaten Florida State no longer would have gotten screwed! Only one G5 team would have made it. Eleven teams would have had a title chance under 1%.
Two of 2024's most enjoyable stories -- Curt Cignetti's Indiana and Ashton Jeanty's Boise State -- would have gotten opportunities to not only make the CFP but win some games. Lane Kiffin's best Ole Miss team would have gotten in, too, with a chance to make some noise; to me, the Rebels were proof that the 12-team playoff still features a good amount of regular-season jeopardy. They were fantastic, but they dropped three tight games and were eliminated no more.
This would have been the most wide-open 24-teamer yet, with Ohio State leading the way at only a 23% title chance, per SP+, and four other teams at 10-15%. Twelve teams still would have started out under 1%.
Notre Dame was to 2025 what Ole Miss was to 2024, but the Irish would have safely been in and likely headed toward a quarterfinal matchup with Indiana, which drew the No. 2 seed only because there was no chance to beat Ohio State in Indianapolis. Of course, the Buckeyes and Hoosiers would have started this playoff as clear favorites -- IU at 28%, OSU at 23% -- while the next four seeds would have been at 6-13% and 12 teams under 1%.
Would there inevitably have been some classics in the first and second rounds? Of course. Is it worth the tradeoffs of expansion -- the diminished regular-season games (with their as yet untold effects on attendance or ratings), the infinitely less interesting conference races and ties at the top, etc.? That's in the eye of the beholder.
In defense of conference title games
Conference title games have gotten a bad rap over the past couple of years. Or at least, some justifiable negativity has been misdirected. The fact that some teams play a 13th game has been an increasingly awkward detail in the 12-team playoff era -- it opens them up to injury (Georgia's Carson Beck in 2024), and the CFP committee ties itself in knots not to punish teams for losing a 13th game (for example, Alabama getting smoked by Georgia in 2025 and not falling in the rankings).
The 13th game should indeed be abolished. But there's a way to have everyone play their 12th game during championship week instead: Especially with every power conference soon playing nine-game conference schedules (more or less), why couldn't leagues play eight-game schedules, then determine a full slate of pairings -- including the title game -- for their final conference matchups? Wouldn't that be more exciting than simply ditching title games altogether?
That story from May features a lot more detail, but a flex week approach, not entirely unlike what we're seeing the Pac-12 attempt this season, would allow for far more satisfying conference title intrigue and help us to avoid four-way ties and whatnot. Plus, these games are particularly lucrative for conferences such as the American Conference or MAC; ditching them is just one more way the mid-major conferences get screwed in this moment.
Every championship weekend features some duds, but without title games we wouldn't have gotten Alabama's 27-24 upset of Georgia in the final Saban vs. Kirby Smart game, or Baylor's by-a-millimeter win over Oklahoma State in the 2021 Big 12 championship, or Clemson's 34-31 blow-a-lead-but-win-on-a-long-field-goal win over SMU in the 2024 ACC championship, or No. 2 Indiana's epic 13-10 rock-fight win over No. 1 Ohio State in the 2025 Big Ten championship, or quite a few other classics. Again, the first and second rounds of a CFP would give us doozies, too, but the bar is high. And if there really is a way to keep title games -- and, yes, the money they create -- why wouldn't we?
(At the very least, I'd highly advise Group of 6 conferences to look into the flex week route even if the big boys have decided they don't need the tens of millions of dollars.)
What this does to bowls
Even in the playoff era -- with the highest-ranked bowl teams disappointed that they didn't make the CFP, with stars opting out, and now with loads of players electing to enter the transfer portal instead of bowling -- people are still watching bowl games, and they still end up giving us quite a few of the best matchups in a given season. They're basically exhibitions now, but hey, that's what they were in the mid-1900s, too, right?
Taking another 12 teams -- and basically all but one ranked team -- out of the bowl pool, however, will probably have consequences. First, you're going to end up with either fewer overall bowls or more sub-.500 teams filling spots. And now the top teams in the bowl pool are going to be disappointed they didn't make the CFP and, well, just worse.
Looking at the 2025 bowl pool as an example, here's what the top non-CFP bowls might have looked like had the top 24 teams all made the CFP. Instead of worrying about conference ties, I basically just tried to create the most interesting possible matchups among the best or most marketable teams in the pool.
- Citrus Bowl: Missouri (8-4) vs. Illinois (8-4)
- ReliaQuest Bowl: Tennessee (8-4) vs. TCU (8-4)
- Pop-Tarts Bowl: Louisville (8-4) vs. Arizona State (8-4)
- Alamo Bowl: SMU (8-4) vs. LSU (7-5)
- Gator Bowl: Iowa State (8-4) vs. Nebraska (7-5)
- Duke's Mayo Bowl: Wake Forest (8-4) vs. Kansas State (6-6)
- Fenway Bowl: Pitt (8-4) vs. Penn State (6-6)
- Pinstripe Bowl: UConn (9-3) vs. NC State (7-5)
- Texas Bowl: Clemson (7-5) vs. Northwestern (6-6)
- Liberty Bowl: James Madison (11-1) vs. Duke (7-5)
There will be plenty of mid-majors with good records left out of CFP consideration, and I'd love for them to get shots at bigger teams here, but that's not usually the way the world works. And I guess for the Group of 6 champions that aren't included in the CFP (which will be most of them), they could almost pair up and attempt their own playoff of sorts within the bowl structure. There's room for creativity, and people will still watch games like the ones above. But obviously this hits the bowls pretty hard.
What this does to the Group of 6
I don't exactly hide my affinity for college football's long tail. Boise State's rise might be my favorite story this sport has ever produced, and the exponential increase in the distance between the richest conferences and everyone else really hurts the sport, in my opinion, especially with the transfer portal giving them a mechanism for taking all of the G6's best players, too (and without paying a transfer fee, as in soccer). (Again, covering the World Cup and watching in person as countries such as Cape Verde and DR Congo briefly took over the world didn't exactly dissuade me of these feelings.)
As I mentioned above, the FBS is going to become the only level of football that doesn't invite all its champions to a big playoff. The cruddy districts in high school ball get representation, as do anyone who wants it in FCS, Division II or Division III. A 7-10 division champion will get into the NFL playoffs. But up to five of six Group of 6 champions in a given season will be turned away for an 8-4 SEC team that has already gotten quite a few (likely failed) shots at the elites. That's a huge slap in the face.
On top of all that, a new scheduling policy will make things even worse. To get the SEC on board with the 24-team plan, a 10-game power-conference scheduling commitment was arranged. Power-conference teams will now have only two spots left for G6 or FCS opponents. And guess what: They won't be scheduling the good ones. No one's going to want to play James Madison or Boise State -- the power schools need the wins! And then guess what will happen to an 11-1 James Madison with no power-conference opponents? The Dukes will get left out of the top 24 because they didn't schedule ambitiously enough. Fun game, huh?
The 'How Sports Fall From Grace' checklist
Last year, I wrote a book called "Forward Progress," a look at basically how we got to this moment of change in college football and where I thought we were going with it. Granted, I far underestimated the odds of a 24-team playoff taking effect (especially this quickly), but it's still a pretty informational read. And one of the key chapters is called "How Sports Fall From Grace."
With attendance levels and TV ratings steady, there's no real way to say that college football is suffering from the waves of changes, popular and unpopular. So I wrote about the lessons that could be learned from other sports that did see their popularity fade through some mix of unforced errors and poor fortune -- NASCAR, boxing, and even baseball and college basketball to a degree.
With those lessons in mind, I came up with a nine-item checklist for putting yourself in serious danger. If you're in trouble, you won't know until it's too late, and damned if college football isn't treating this like a to-do list.
1. Don't take your core fans for granted. College football has never done this more than it's doing in the 2020s.
2. Don't change too much at once. Check.
3. Keep your product where your audience can see it. It's definitely a little trickier now and might require another streaming subscription.
4. Keep the participants (as) healthy (as possible). This will always be an issue with a sport this violent, but at least we're paying guys to play up to 17 games in a season now!
5. Don't make your title race too hard to follow. I was referring to the endless tweaks to NASCAR's points race, but if you twist it a bit, you could say that the CFP committee has definitely made things difficult in its own way.
6. Fans hate fights over money. This one might be a bigger fight in the coming years.
7. Too much inequality sucks (or at least, it doesn't help). This one has always been an issue for college football, but, mercy, is the inequality growing quickly, at least between powers and mid-majors.
8. You don't have as much control over everything as you think. Maybe everything's fine as long as the economy is great, but if there's a downturn, or travel costs go through the roof, or a family's entertainment budget is stretched in other directions, you might suddenly lose a lot of casual fans and find that you took your core fans for granted, and they aren't there when you need them.
9. Understand your roots. Oklahoma and Oklahoma State aren't playing against each other in football. Mizzou-Kansas and Pitt-West Virginia play only occasionally. Oregon and Oregon State aren't playing this year. The roots are not healthy.
When the strangest waves of realignment were hitting just as the CFP was expanding to 12 teams and players started making legitimate money, there was a lot of hand-wringing about how we're killing the sport, how it will become unrecognizable soon, how Alabama coaches will sit key players for the Iron Bowl because it doesn't matter if they win or lose. My response at the time was consistent: Just trust the product. Ohio State and Texas in early September will always feel big even if both teams start every season almost assured of a CFP bid. The Iron Bowl will always be enormous. And besides, we've never watched this sport because of quality leadership -- I know that because it's never had any! It has always been ridiculous, and yet we're still all here.
Now, I guess I have to tell myself that. I was in favor of every playoff idea and every playoff expansion proposal until now, but this is the first one I just can't get behind. In my head, at least, that matters. I'll still write giant first- and second-round playoff previews, and I'll still talk about as many teams and stakes as possible in my in-season content. But even if this sport's leadership has never been strong or helpful, this expansion is the biggest reminder yet that the leaders don't give a single damn about what we want or think. And that's hard to swallow.