The College Football Playoff is expanding again, and quickly. The 12-team format lasted just three years. Starting next season, the field will double to 24 teams, NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan reported in an interview that aired this week.
"Once upon a time, not all that long ago, college football was a sport where the regular season was the focus," Sullivan told host Scott Detrow. Teams that wanted a shot at a national title pretty much had to go undefeated, or take at most one loss to another very good team. "I think we're going to see teams in this playoff — expanded playoff starting next year, where, you know, you can lose three or four times in the regular season and still make it, have a chance at the title, and that's going to be a whole new era for the sport."
How the 24-team field would work
Sullivan said the structure will look familiar to fans of the current 12-team tournament, with one big difference in volume. There will still be five automatic bids: the winners of the four power conferences — the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC — plus the top-ranked team from a mid-major conference. The selection committee will then pick 19 teams instead of seven. Sullivan said it is likely that most of those 19, and in some years all of them, will come from the major conferences, putting "middle-of-the-pack Big Ten, SEC teams" into the field.
The top eight ranked teams will all get a week off, while the bottom 16 play a first-round game. To fit that extra round, Sullivan said, the four power conferences have agreed to sunset their conference championship games — a fixture for two or three decades and, in her words, "a major change as well."
The 24-team field is a separate story from the latest College Football Playoff rankings, which still describe the current 12-team season.
The money behind a longer tournament
Sullivan tied the expansion to the broader professionalization of college sports. ESPN, which broadcasts the playoff, "will reportedly pay hundreds of millions of dollars more each season for these extra games on top of a billion-plus-dollar contract they already signed a couple of years ago." She presented that ESPN figure as a report, not a confirmed contract detail she had independently documented in the interview.
She also noted that expenses have skyrocketed: players can be paid, coaching salaries and staffs have grown, and schools have poured money into facilities, recruiting and travel. Many have had to raise millions of dollars a year from alumni and donors to keep up. A longer playoff, with more televised games, is one way the sport is trying to finance that arms race. Whether fans will still feel that every Saturday in September and October truly matters is the question Sullivan said this new era will test.