Pat Forde: CFP, ESPN Reach Handshake Deal for 24-Team Playoff, and Fans Will Pay the Price

ESPN and the CFP are finalizing a deal to double the size of the playoff. The sport’s diehards will be asked to foot the bill.

College Football Playoff expansion may benefit a few teams each year, but the ramifications for the sport may be wide-ranging. | USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

The penultimate breaking of the social contract between college sports executives and the paying public is at hand. Congrats, commissioners, presidents, athletic directors and TV bosses. It’s not easy to ruinously devalue something of this quality, but through persistent arrogance, myopia and greed, they’ve done it.

(The ultimate break will be the super league. But that’s a few years down the road.)

The cultural jewel that is the college football season has been reduced from cherished heirloom to pawn shop merch. In the race to justify runaway spending, the people in charge—“leaders” is too laudatory a word for them—have cheapened the product while making it massively more expensive to consume.

They’ve let the fans down.

A 24-team College Football Playoff is at hand, agreed upon this week via “handshake deal” according to ESPN, effective in 2027. Almost nobody in the general public asked for this. It is being forced upon us under manufactured pretense, snake oil to cure the healthy.

The 12-team playoff—successful, popular and non-lethal to the regular season—will shut down after this, its third year. We hardly knew ye, 12-teamer. So promising, and gone so young. Rubbed out by expansion mob boss Tony Petitti of the Big Ten and, by complicity, Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey—ironically one of its architects. Sankey was the last line of defense against 24, having been previously abandoned by Brett Yormark of the Big 12 and Jim Phillips of the ACC. He caved, too.

As recently as 2023, we had a four-team playoff. Exploding from four to 24 in four years is whiplash-inducing madness, but those selling it aren’t pausing long enough to acknowledge the unsettling impact. They don’t care.

Why the runaway expansion? Because there is no such thing as enough in an undisciplined market that refuses to regulate itself. NIL is a concept whose time was overdue, but the inability to responsibly budget for it is a failure that apparently cannot be confronted and counteracted. The non-solution is to simply spend more, more, more—and not just for players. For coaches, for facilities, for athletic directors, for support personnel. (To the peril of Olympic sports, of course.)

To compensate for that, here comes the expanded playoff magical thinking. Here come the participation trophies that kneecap the best regular season in all of American sports. Here come the accounting tricks designed to make boosters feel better about their constant donations to fund a roster. Here comes a diminishing of September, October and November games in the vague hope that mid-December matchups of the fifth-place team in the Big Ten against the third-place team from the Big 12 will be an entrancing TV product.

It’s a charade. There will still be the same number of wins and losses. The bracket gets bigger but the urgency gets smaller. Games we will see this weekend—Notre Dame–BYU, Missouri-Mississippi, Wisconsin-UCLA, Oklahoma State–Houston—will have considerably less payload. They’ll be like a Jaguars-Steelers midseason game—interesting but not really impactful.

In trying to sell this lousy concept, Petitti frequently cited a theoretical Minnesota-Iowa game that suddenly had much more at stake in a 24-team playoff world. But here’s the thing: those very two teams will play Oct. 24 with playoff hopes on the line for the 5–1 Hawkeyes. They have a shot at the playoff right now, without dumbing down the concept.

Instead, here’s what will happen: When your team goes 8–4 next year, makes the playoff and loses its first-round game, the school will hang a sign that says “2027 College Football Playoff Participant” on the stadium facade. Translated, that’s “ReliaQuest Bowl Participant” in a more respectable system. Your team will be no better than it was before an expanded playoff, despite the new signage. 

MORE: The 24 Worst Teams That Would Have Made the College Football Playoff in New 24-Team Format

But as a Playoff Participant, the football general manager will be emboldened to request more money to outbid all rivals for the transfer edge rusher from the Sun Belt, the left tackle from the Big Sky and the wideout from the Pac-12. For the low, low price of a $10 million increase in payroll, 8–4 could turn into 9–3 and a home first-round game the following year. Schedule the parade!

The 24-team monstrosity will be sold as more championship access for more schools, citing what is currently the lowest participation percentage in any NCAA sport (12 spots for 138 teams, or 8.7%). It will be, at best, a half-truth. 

The new playoff will not be 24 spots for 138 teams. Most years it will be 23 for 68 teams in the power conferences plus Notre Dame (33.8%) and one spot for the other 70 to fight over. As is the case with the junked-up, 76-team basketball tournaments that will debut in March, the goal is to further enable the power conferences. Not everyone. Of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.

This perpetuates the consolidation of power in the hands of the few. Via media-rights revenue, TV exposure, scheduling and playoff access, the Power Four continues to push the Group of 6 further to the periphery. Almost daring them to give up and hold their own championship.

Ohio State beat Notre Dame to win the first national championship in the 12-team College Football Playoff era to cap the 2024 season. After just three seasons, the playoff is set to double in size. | USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Connect

Will there be better non-conference matchups in a 24-team world? Maybe. Allegedly. If it forces Indiana to play someone from a power conference, that’s not a bad thing. (Presumably, the Hoosiers could not sign a 12-year, home-and-home contract with Boston College and call it a day.) 

But those matchups will also mean less. Ohio State-Texas will always carry cache, but less risk-reward. The winner of that matchup made the playoff last year and the loser did not. Same with Notre Dame vs. Miami. Same with Oklahoma vs. Michigan. Going forward, the loser of those games might not have anything to worry about. Notre Dame could make the playoff most years without even breaking a sweat, a season devoid of drama.

Meanwhile, schools will continually want the fans to pay more for those less meaningful games. More for tickets, more for seat donations, more for parking, more for concessions—and of course, more for NIL. (Please scan the QR codes in the stadium concourses for ways to donate.) And if the donations don’t come in, well, the losing is on you, the fan.

This is the increasingly cynical relationship between those offering the product and those being asked to consume it. The people in charge will keep pushing fans to accept more indignities, because college football consumers have shown a remarkable tolerance for being taken advantage of.

Do fans want geographically nonsensical conference realignment that kill rivalries and create sterile matchups? The power brokers don’t care.

Do Nebraska fans want a 10 p.m. CT kickoff at Oregon on Saturday? Or Wake Forest fans want a 10:30 p.m. ET kickoff at California? The power brokers don’t care.

Do fans want to pay increasing amounts in subscription fees for broadcast viewing? The power brokers don’t care.

Do fans want Week Zero games amid increasingly hot and volatile weather? The power brokers don’t care.

Do fans want a 24-team playoff? No. But, again, the power brokers don’t care. They’re in the business of taking, not asking.

Eventually, though, there could be a reckoning as the sport’s temperature cools from heated passion to cold profession. Trust can turn to disgust, or at least apathy. With an unchecked appetite for more, the alleged leaders keep betraying the social contract that comes with college football. Eventually, the turnip runs out of blood to squeeze.

---

PODCAST: Listen to Sports Illustrated’s college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, hosted by Pat Forde, on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s college YouTube channel or on SI TV.