Boy, did the last week of college football games live up to its billing. Five of the top seven teams in the Associated Press Top 25 lost for the first time this season. If that doesn’t make you feel romantic about college football, I don’t know what will.
We still have little idea who's actually good, who's punching above their weight and whose season is about to fall apart. But that's the beauty of the sport with 12 College Football Playoff spots on the line, and it's certainly looking like there's more playoff madness to come. In massive news, the CFP is seemingly headed for expansion to 24 teams from the current format of 12.
Here’s what you should be keeping an eye on. The 24-team playoff is coming. It’s not 100 percent completed, but everything I and others have reported over the past two weeks suggests this is headed for resolution in short order.
What should college football fans make of it? Well, there’s a lot to unpack. For our purposes, let's dive into a few of the lingering pieces that need to be sorted out — and there are many fine details.
These are just a few: What Will The New CFP Schedule Look Like? I wrote about this at length about two weeks ago, but the exact scheduling puzzle with the new CFP games isn’t quite as complicated as you might think. The skinny is that with the elimination of most, if not all, conference championship games, that first weekend of December is now open for Army-Navy to play their contest in a standalone window.
CFP first-round games, meanwhile, would then be played starting the second week of December — where Army-Navy had traditionally resided — with the new second round, quarterfinals, semifinals and national title progressing from there. A few other nuggets related to the schedule Who Will Broadcast The New CFP Games? The NFL has done wonders in boosting its annual media returns by rotating the Super Bowl to a handful of networks.
College football, meanwhile, doesn’t operate that way. The piecemeal approach to media rights in the college space is essentially the equivalent of the NFC East and AFC West having different deals with different networks that are based on past performance and history. Right or wrong, that’s how this world exists.
The thought within the industry has been that the CFP could fetch more money for its additional games — helping justify the expansion — if it were to take it to market and allow for other networks to bid. That is unlikely to be the case at this point, as ESPN has angled toward controlling the entire postseason. That does, however, open the door to sublicensing.
The network might look to offload some of these new games in the way it already has through an agreement with TNT Sports (now part of Skydance). Sources briefed on the CFP discussions told me there are machinations to be worked out around any sublicensing that might happen and where any added revenue from such efforts would go. For games on TNT, for example, ESPN received all the additional revenue it generated by sublicensing.
So — using hypothetical numbers — if those games were valued at $50 million each and ESPN sold them for $100 million, the extra $50 million went entirely to the network. Discussions are ongoing, but it’s possible a revenue share above the make-whole value of those games could be incorporated into the CFP’s new games, if they’re offloaded at some point in the future — which is no guarantee. Again, none of this is final and talks are ongoing.
What Other CFP Negotiations Might Be Coming? One thing that’s worth noting in all of this is that the CFP’s latest media rights deal with ESPN, which went into effect with the 2026 event, has not actually been finalized. The parties have been effectively working off a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the better part of a year now.
That left the door open for discussions involving expansion and potential changes or clarifications that needed to be made in the long-form version of the contract. One key component is that the CFP has a look-in provision slated for 2028. What a look-in actually entails is subjective and varies widely depending on who you ask.
If the games over-perform, could the CFP ask for more money? Perhaps. Is it really just a chance to evaluate minor details?
Also, possibly that. That said, I'm told it's unlikely there would be any major changes made to the CFP structure through the end of the current deal in 2031-32, assuming it does, in fact, expand to 24 teams. I sat down with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey during SEC media days in 2025, and one thing we discussed was whether constantly changing the CFP format created increasing angst with fans.
"Depends if your view is consistent with the notion that any publicity is good publicity," he joked, tongue-in-cheek. "My personal view is the move to 12 was appropriate. The timing was really on point.
I think 12, as envisioned, worked well. "… Whether it goes to 14 or 16, that conversation became public pretty quickly, without the rationale.
But for any set of issues, you need to make a decision, put the book on the shelf and refer to it a bit when you need to, but not rewrite the story all the time." The CFP is now headed toward 24 teams. Are we just a year away from tinkering even further? Probably not.
