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The College Football Playoff will expand to 12 teams by 2026, the CFP Board of Managers announced Friday.
The new format will feature the six highest-ranked conference champions, along with six at-large teams and is set to begin in 2026 “unless earlier implementation is possible,” according to a news release. Expansion passed via a unanimous vote by the board.
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“It was time for us to make a decision,” said CFP board chair Mark Keenum, who is the Mississippi State university president. “We need to give direction to our commissioners: This is where we are, this is where we think college football needs to be headed.”
Keenum emphasized that the expanded Playoff will increase access and engagement across the sport, allowing more teams to participate in an event that determines the sport national champion. It will also be an important revenue-driver for many.
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The four highest-ranked conference champions will be seeded one through four and each will receive a first-round bye, according to the release. The other eight teams will play in the first round with the higher seeds hosting the lower seeds either on campus or at other sites designated by the higher seed.
𝗢𝗙𝗙𝗜𝗖𝗜𝗔𝗟: College Football Playoff Board of Managers Votes to Expand Playoff to 12 Teams
Details on today's meeting » https://t.co/x77b7YFPbt#CFBPlayoff 🏈🏆 pic.twitter.com/M6LbtdGaEj
— College Football Playoff (@CFBPlayoff) September 2, 2022
The CFP Management Committee, made up of 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, will be tasked with implementing the board’s decision. That will include determining dates for games, broadcast entities, revenue allocations, sites of the 11 games, the term of the agreement and whether implementation is possible in 2024 or 2025.
Keenum noted that there are “tremendous” logistical challenges to early implementation, ranging from championship game venue availability, existing bowl game contracts and the question of broadcast partner(s). CFP executive director Bill Hancock said Friday that ESPN, who is the exclusive rightsholder of the current four-team CFP, will have the first right of refusal for games added during the current contract, which extends through the 2025-26 season.
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Sources familiar with the CFP’s contract said it is possible that the CFP takes the 12-team model for 2026 and beyond to the open market, and that it then goes to ESPN to see if ESPN could broadcast the expanded field for the final one or two years of its current deal as a separate issue. All parties involved in the expansion process have said they support the idea of multiple media partners in the future iteration of the format — like the NFL has with its postseason. NBC and CBS just announced new Big Ten football packages, which Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren told The Athletic he hopes leads to them bidding on CFP packages alongside ESPN and FOX.
Friday’s news was both stunning and long-awaited. The proposal that the board approved was nearly identical to the one initially proposed more than a year ago by a CFP subcommittee that included SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson and Swarbrick. They believed it to be the best possible compromise for all involved, prioritizing both conference champions and at-large access.
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But, after eight months of meetings among the full commissioner group to vet the proposal, efforts to expand the CFP prior to the end of its current contract failed last winter. The Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 all voted against early expansion for various reasons but have since resolved many of their issues with the updated format. Keenum, asked repeatedly what took so long to get CFP expansion to the finish line, said “it just took time” for all of the sport’s stakeholders to get on the same page while there are “so many moving parts” in college athletics as a whole right now.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told The Athletic on Wednesday that the ACC “has been supportive of expansion from the very start” and was pleased with progress he and his peers have made in their 365-day evaluation of the college football calendar, including an examination of health and safety concerns tied to playing additional games.
Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren told The Athletic last month that he was softening his stance on automatic qualifiers for Power 5 champions, one of the league’s sticking points. Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff, who had been hung up on issues surrounding revenue sharing, changed his tune somewhat at his league’s media days, noting that he was bullish on expansion, too, and that he believed there are ways to implement it as early as 2024.
It has been estimated that two additional years of a 12-team CFP (for the 2024 and 2025 seasons) could be worth approximately half a billion dollars of additional revenue.
(Photo: Don Juan Moore / Getty Images)