College football has spent the better part of a decade arguing about how many teams deserve a shot at the national championship. The sport went from two, to four, to twelve — and now, barely two years into the 12-team experiment, the most powerful voices in the sport are already pushing for another doubling. The College Football Playoff is reportedly eyeing an expansion to 24 teams, a proposal that sounds ambitious on the surface but threatens to fundamentally unravel the very things that make college football the most compelling sport in America.
This is not a debate about gatekeeping or competitive fairness. It is a debate about identity — about what college football actually is, and whether the people running it understand what they have.
Who Wants What, and Why It Matters
The landscape of this debate is already fractured along familiar fault lines of conference power and financial self-interest. The ACC, Big 12, and Big Ten have aligned in favor of expanding to 24 teams. Their motivations are not difficult to understand — more playoff spots mean more revenue, more exposure, and more protection for their member schools against the kind of late-season collapse that currently carries playoff-eliminating consequences.
But two of the most consequential voices in the room are pumping the brakes hard.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey has made his position unambiguous: he and his conference’s athletic directors are holding at 16 teams as their ceiling. That stance carries enormous weight. The SEC is, by most measures, the dominant conference in college football — its champion has lifted the national trophy more often than any other league in the modern era. When Sankey draws a line, the rest of the sport feels it.
Perhaps more surprising — and more telling — is the position of ESPN, the network that carries the lion’s share of CFP programming and signed a six-year, $7.8 billion deal for playoff rights through the 2031-32 season in March 2024. That contract won’t change regardless of how many teams are eventually included in the field. Yet despite having a financial stake in expanded viewership, ESPN has reportedly signaled it wants to stay at 12 teams. ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips told reporters that the network “has been pretty clear” it wants no growth beyond the current format, adding that ESPN might accept 14 teams but “wants no more than 16.”
When the network that benefits most from increased content is the one urging restraint, that is a signal worth taking seriously. ESPN understands that the value of the product is not purely volumetric — more games do not automatically mean more interest, and a diluted playoff could undermine the very premium that makes the CFP worth billions in the first place.
For context, it was already confirmed earlier this year that the 12-team format will remain in place for at least the 2026 season. The push for 24 is, for now, a negotiation — but negotiations have a way of moving faster than fans realize.
The Surface Appeal, and Why It Evaporates Quickly
It would be dishonest to dismiss the 24-team proposal without acknowledging its surface logic. In any given season, there are teams that finish with strong records and compelling résumés but fall outside the 12-team bracket. A 9-4 team like the South Carolina squad head coach Shane Beamer put together in 2024, for instance, would almost certainly find a home in a 24-team field. For fans of programs that spend most years in the middle tier of college football — competitive but rarely elite — the idea of a wider postseason door has genuine emotional appeal.
There is also the undeniable financial reality. Expanding the bracket means more playoff games, more television windows, more ticket revenue, and more distributed money to conferences and schools. In an era of NIL, revenue sharing, and the ongoing restructuring of the college sports economic model, dismissing the financial argument would be naive.
But here is the problem: money and meaning are not the same thing, and college football has historically derived its financial value from its meaning. The moment the regular season stops meaning something, the money follows.
The Regular Season Is the Product
No other major American sport — not the NFL, not the NBA, not Major League Baseball — can claim that its regular season carries the weight that college football’s does. Every week from September through November, games have direct postseason consequences. Rankings shift. Championship windows open and close in the span of three hours on a Saturday afternoon. That volatility is not a bug; it is the entire point.
Consider the 2024 season alone. Florida’s upset of Texas at home didn’t just rattle the Longhorns — it ultimately kept them out of the postseason entirely. SMU’s double-overtime victory over Miami appeared, at the time, to be a decisive blow to the Hurricanes’ playoff hopes, before the ACC’s decision to include a five-loss Duke team in the conference championship complicated the picture considerably. South Carolina’s own 17-14 win over Clemson looked to have ended the Tigers’ season before Miami’s 42-38 loss to Syracuse reopened the ACC title game door for Dabo Swinney’s program.
Each of those moments was meaningful precisely because the margin for error was so thin. A single loss could end everything. That pressure is what makes regular-season college football unlike anything else in sports.
Expand to 24 teams and that pressure disappears. A team with three or four losses could realistically make the playoff field. The mathematical consequences of a mid-October upset would shrink dramatically. Florida beats Texas? Texas is probably still in. SMU upsets Miami? Miami can absorb it. The dominoes stop falling because there are too many safety nets in place to let them fall.
The sport’s most electric moments are rooted in consequence. Vanderbilt’s 40-35 upset over then-No. 1 Alabama in 2024 — the Commodores’ first-ever victory over a top-ranked team — reverberated across the sport precisely because it mattered. Michigan’s upset over Ohio State that same season carried weight because both programs understood that losing meant something severe. Tennessee’s 2022 victory over Alabama, ending a 15-year losing streak, and the goal post demolition that followed, will live in college football memory forever — fueled in no small part by the knowledge that it changed the shape of the entire season.
A 24-team playoff would not eliminate upsets, but it would hollow them out. The emotional stakes are tied directly to the postseason stakes, and when the postseason becomes accessible enough, the regular season becomes an extended preseason.
South Carolina fans know this better than most. The 2010 upset of No. 1 Alabama and the 2013 overtime win over No. 5 Missouri are program-defining moments precisely because they occurred when every game felt like it could be the last. Strip away that context and they become highlights without gravity.
Conference Championships: An Endangered Species
If the regular season is one casualty of a 24-team expansion, the conference championship game is the other — and this one comes with a direct financial cost.
Conference title games are lucrative standalone events. They generate their own television contracts, ticket revenue, and fanbase engagement. They also serve a meaningful competitive function: giving teams a second chance to prove themselves, or a chance to be exposed. Some of the most consequential and entertaining games in recent college football history have been conference championships.
Indiana’s 13-10 upset of Ohio State in last year’s Big Ten title game was a shock that reordered the playoff conversation overnight. Alabama’s 27-24 victory over Georgia in the 2023 SEC Championship ended the Bulldogs’ 29-game winning streak and altered the playoff field dramatically. Ohio State’s 59-0 demolition of Wisconsin in the 2014 Big Ten title game was a statement performance so dominant that it convinced the selection committee to choose the Buckeyes over both Baylor and TCU — a decision that proved correct when Ohio State went on to win the national championship. Clemson’s 34-21 win over SMU in the 2024 ACC title, Kansas State’s 31-28 overtime thriller against TCU in the 2022 Big 12 Championship — these are games that belong in any honest conversation about college football at its best.
Under a 24-team system, conference championship games risk becoming meaningless. If 24 teams are already in the bracket regardless of what happens in early December, the urgency evaporates. CBS Sports has reported that there would be serious lost revenue tied to the diminishment of those games, and the competitive logic for playing them under a bloated bracket is difficult to construct.
The March Madness Comparison Doesn’t Hold
Proponents of a 24-team playoff often reach for the March Madness analogy — the idea that a wide-open, bracket-style tournament produces chaos, Cinderella stories, and massive national engagement. It is not an unreasonable point of comparison on its face. March Madness is one of the most-watched sporting events in the country.
But the analogy breaks down immediately upon examination. College basketball’s regular season is 30-plus games long, spread across months, and while competitive, does not carry the game-by-game narrative weight of college football. Basketball fans accept that regular-season losses are largely absorbed into a long schedule. College football has never worked that way, and its value is built on the fact that it doesn’t.
Additionally, the NFL — the most financially successful sports league on the planet — runs a 14-team playoff out of a 32-team league. College football, with its 130-plus FBS programs, is now contemplating a 24-team field. That would give nearly one in five programs a realistic shot at the championship in any given year. At that point, the postseason is not an elite destination — it is an expectation.
The Right Question to Ask
The loudest argument for expansion is that deserving teams are being left out. That argument deserves engagement. The 12-team format was itself a response to the legitimate criticism that a four-team field was too narrow to be truly representative. And 16 teams — the position held by Sankey and, according to reports, broadly acceptable to ESPN — may well represent a reasonable middle ground that adds access without gutting meaning.
But 24 teams is not a calibration. It is a transformation. It would require college football to become a different sport in its postseason identity — one that more closely resembles basketball or hockey than the high-stakes, low-margin competition that has made it what it is.
College football has, against considerable odds, built something genuinely rare: a regular season that functions as must-watch television every single week, in which every game carries real weight and real consequence. The sport generates billions of dollars in revenue not despite that structure but because of it.
The March Madness model is appealing to administrators because it generates enormous short-term revenue. But March Madness works because basketball’s regular season was never the primary draw. College football’s regular season has always been everything.
Expanding to 24 teams is, at its core, a willingness to trade the sport’s most valuable asset — regular-season consequence — for short-term financial gain. That may be a trade some conferences are willing to make. It is not a trade that serves the sport, its history, or the fans who have built their falls around it.
College football, right now, has a pretty good thing going. The responsible move is to recognize that before it’s gone.
