Josh Pate Sounds Off as 24-Team College Football Playoff Push Gains Momentum

The push for a 24-team College Football Playoff is gaining momentum across power conferences, but analyst Josh Pate is pushing back hard, warning it could fundamentally reshape college football and dilute the regular season.

A view of the college football playoff national championship trophy | Brett Davis-Imagn Images

The push to expand the College Football Playoff to 24 teams has become one of the most publicly scrutinized proposals in recent history. Now, one of college football's most respected voices has joined the growing list of people pushing back against the idea.

On Thursday’s episode of ESPN’s “Get Up,” analyst Josh Pate delivered a strong critique of the proposed 24-team CFP model, calling it “one of the worst ideas I’ve heard,” and arguing that expansion is being driven less by competitive logic and more by financial incentives inside conference headquarters.

"If you go back to when we had four, and you would have polled the college football fans, the college football public, there would have been a super majority support to expand. Most people wanted expansion back then," Pate said. "Even now with the general public, this is one of the most unpopular movements or proposals that we've seen in a long time."

"If I were to just sit these people down at that table, and I would have said, what makes college football great to you guys? Do you know how many blank stares you would get on your face? Do you know how much shuffling and how much nervous body language there would be to try to contrive a football-based answer? Because they don't know. To them, it's an ATM," Pate continued. 

"What makes college football great is, of course, the regular season. What makes college football great is Saturdays in the fall. And for a lot of us who love this sport, anything that treads on Saturdays in the Fall is going to really, really get us aggravated and mobilized. I'm one of them."

"I frankly don't care what you've done in Major League Baseball. I can respect it, but I don't care. And I don't care how this sport compares to the NBA or NFL because college football is one of one to us. The regular season is the nucleus of this sport, and any infringement on it, it really aggravates people like me. And apparently I'm not alone here," he added.

"One of the worst ideas I've heard. ... This is one of the most unpopular movements or proposals that we've seen in a long time."

—@JoshPateCFB on possible expansion of the College Football Playoff to 24 teams 🏈 pic.twitter.com/3zhWtiFU0q

— Get Up (@GetUpESPN) May 21, 2026

How the CFP came to be and the push for expansion

The College Football Playoff, which began in 2014 as a four-team invitational, was designed to preserve regular-season intensity while adding a clearer national title path.

But as the sport grew, so did the demand to expand.

Years of controversy over “snubs” and undefeated programs outside the top four eventually forced a compromise, with the CFP expanding to 12 teams beginning with the 2024–25 cycle.

That changed everything. More programs entered the title conversation, TV inventory surged, and ESPN and partner networks leaned into a longer, more lucrative playoff calendar.

Indiana Hoosiers braved the single-digit cold weather to celebrate the Indiana Football College Football Playoff National Championship celebration | Grace Hollars-USA TODAY Network via Imagn Images

Front Office Sports reported playoff games averaging well over 16 million viewers, with marquee matchups pushing even higher and quarterfinal rounds topping 19 million viewers in 2026, marking double-digit percentage increases year-over-year as the new structure settled in.

That ratings lift has translated directly into financial growth, with the CFP generating hundreds of millions more annually through added games, extended TV windows, and expanded advertising inventory tied to ESPN’s long-term media rights deal.

That's why everyone views this decision as money-motivated more than football-related. If we can do all of that with just 12 teams competing over a 4-week span, imagine what we could do with 24 teams?

Indiana's Fernando Mendoza (15) smiles as he celebrates after the College Football Playoff National Championship college football game at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens on Monday, Jan. 19, 2026. | Rich Janzaruk/Herald-Times / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

The consequences of a 24-team College Football Playoff

Supporters of an expanded playoff format argue that college football is changing in a way that teams are no longer stable from year to year. With the transfer portal more active than ever, players can switch schools more easily, and rosters can look very different season to season.

As a result, the belief is that an early loss in September or October shouldn’t hurt a program as much anymore, because that team might not even be the same team by the end of the season.

Critics like Pate, however, see a system that only cares about revenue and risks devaluing and potentially destroying the regular season entirely.

The sport’s week-to-week intensity, where every game can carry major consequences, is what makes college football so compelling, and expanding the playoff could make some of those games meaningless.

Ole Miss defensive tackle Will Echoles (52) tackles Tulane wide receiver A. Brown-Stephens (5) during the first round of the College Football Playoff at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Miss., on Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025. | Lauren Witte/Clarion Ledger / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

If two dozen teams can qualify for the playoffs, that also opens the door for multiple three-loss teams and a wider range of lopsided matchups.

Fans were already upset when Ole Miss beat the brakes off Tulane in the first round this last year, or whether schools like Tulane and JMU even deserved to be there in the first place, while traditional powers like Notre Dame and Miami were competing for a final at-large spot.

Iowa, which narrowly lost to Indiana and Oregon during the regular season, likely would have been more competitive than some lower-seeded teams that advanced, including JMU, which fell by nearly 20 to that same Oregon team. Still, letting in a four-loss Hawkeyes team would raise even bigger questions.

There will always be debates about who deserves to get in, no matter the format. But if expansion goes too far, it risks turning parts of the regular season into something closer to exhibition football, with more uneven postseason matchups once December hits.