The decision to expand the College Football Playoff to 24 teams, which now appears increasingly likely beginning with the 2027 season, is one driven primarily by the economics of television. There will be arguments about access, fairness and creating more opportunities for deserving teams, and some of those arguments will have merit. But none of them really explains why a sport that just expanded its postseason from four teams to 12 in 2024 is already preparing to double the size of its championship field.
The explanation is much simpler than that. Live sports remain among the most dependable properties in television, particularly in an entertainment environment where audiences are increasingly fragmented and the traditional television model continues to lose ground to streaming. Advertisers want programming that people watch when it happens, preferably without skipping through the commercials, and college football continues to deliver precisely that kind of audience. The appetite for the sport, at least as measured by television consumption, has shown remarkably few signs of reaching its ceiling.
Even with the expansion to 12 teams, the regular season remains an enormous television attraction. ESPN’s family of networks enjoyed its strongest college football regular-season audience since 2011 last year, while Ohio State and Michigan attracted 18.4 million viewers on FOX. Those are not the numbers of a sport suffering from widespread audience fatigue. They are the numbers of an entertainment property whose value continues to grow, even as the people who consume it complain about many of the changes being made.
From that standpoint, the push for further expansion was probably inevitable. The networks see an opportunity to acquire additional high-value programming, conference administrators see another avenue for revenue and university athletic departments see a way to help support financial models that have become increasingly expensive to maintain. The fact that fans might not particularly want another round of expansion is interesting, but it is not necessarily relevant to the people making the decisions.
And that is where this entire conversation becomes a little more revealing.
There is considerable evidence that college football fans are skeptical of a 24-team playoff, although I would be careful about declaring that a definitive majority opposes it based on the available polling. The resistance is understandable. Fans recognize that part of what has historically separated college football from other sports is the importance attached to virtually every Saturday. A single loss could fundamentally change the course of a season, and games between championship contenders often carried something approaching postseason consequences long before the actual postseason arrived.
But there is a difference between what consumers say they want and what their behavior suggests they are willing to support. Someone might insist that 24 teams are too many, that the regular season is being diminished and that the sport is losing something important in the process. Then December arrives, Oregon is playing a first-round game against a recognizable opponent and that same person is sitting in front of the television watching every snap.
The networks understand that contradiction better than anyone.
They are not necessarily betting that fans will embrace a 24-team playoff as an improvement to the sport. They are betting that the emotional investment fans have already made in their teams will outweigh whatever objections they have to the format. There is a substantial difference between those two propositions, and it explains why fan resistance has so little leverage in these conversations.
The interesting part is that expanding the playoff doesn’t necessarily create more demand for college football. In some respects, it simply gives television a more profitable way to package demand that already exists.
Consider the postseason bowl structure. Outside the handful of games that still carry considerable tradition or feature especially attractive matchups, much of the bowl calendar has become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the rest of the television schedule. Players opt out, coaching staffs change and the transfer portal can leave participating teams looking considerably different from the versions that played during the regular season. For fans without a direct connection to either program, the incentive to watch can be limited.
Now imagine replacing some of that inventory with games that have actual championship consequences. Instead of two teams playing in a bowl largely because their seasons qualified them for an additional appearance, they are playing because the winner advances and the loser goes home. The television audience has a much clearer reason to care, particularly if one of those teams represents a major conference with a substantial national following.
The television industry has effectively traded a relatively weak asset for one with considerably greater commercial potential. The game is still being played, the cameras are still rolling and the advertising breaks are still available, but the product has been given something the old bowl system increasingly struggles to provide: meaningful stakes.
That doesn’t mean every lesser bowl game will disappear, nor does it guarantee that every additional playoff game will outperform every bowl it might replace. The strongest postseason matchups already attract significant audiences, and not every game involving the 23rd- or 24th-ranked team will generate extraordinary interest. But the broader economic proposition is easy to understand. A playoff game gives the networks a more marketable event, and marketable events are the currency of the modern sports television business.
There is another wrinkle in the proposal that makes the economics even more interesting. The 24-team model could eliminate the Power Four conference championship games altogether, replacing them with additional playoff inventory. That would not simply be a matter of putting more games on television. It would represent a deliberate decision to take something that already carries financial value and exchange it for something the conferences and television partners believe could be worth even more.
The conferences are not doing this because they suddenly stopped caring about conference championships. They are examining whether the financial return from those championship games can be matched or exceeded by a larger national tournament. ESPN’s existing six-year, $7.8 billion playoff agreement provides some indication of the scale of the business involved, and the negotiations over expansion are fundamentally about determining how much additional inventory is worth and who receives the resulting revenue.
Of course, there is a football argument on the other side of the ledger.
A 24-team playoff inevitably changes the definition of a successful regular season. Under the four-team system, a second loss could effectively end a team’s national championship hopes. Even with 12 teams, the separation between a championship contender and a team watching from home remains relatively narrow. Expanding to 24 could give programs with three or perhaps even four losses a legitimate opportunity to compete for a national championship, depending on the strength of their schedules and the rest of the field.
For some fans, that represents a welcome correction to a system that has historically denied deserving teams an opportunity to prove themselves on the field. For others, it fundamentally changes the significance of the regular season, allowing teams that have already demonstrated significant weaknesses to remain in championship contention. Both perspectives have a legitimate foundation, and neither can simply be dismissed.
But I also think there is a tendency to exaggerate the consequences of expansion when it comes to the regular season. The importance of a game is not determined exclusively by whether losing it eliminates a team from championship consideration. Rivalries still matter, conference standings still matter and the difference between hosting a playoff game in December and traveling across the country to play one could become an enormous incentive.
An Oregon team fighting for a first-round bye or the opportunity to host a December game at Autzen Stadium would have plenty to play for, even if a loss no longer meant automatic elimination. In some ways, expansion could actually create meaningful late-season games for programs that would otherwise be playing out the schedule with no realistic postseason championship aspirations.
The question is whether those additional meaningful games sufficiently compensate for losing some of the jeopardy that has always made college football different.
I am not entirely convinced they do.
There is something uniquely compelling about a sport in which every game feels capable of reshaping the national championship picture. I don’t believe college football needs 24 teams to identify a legitimate champion, and I certainly don’t believe there are 24 programs in a typical season that have demonstrated championship-level performance. More opportunity does not necessarily produce a better method of identifying the best team.
At the same time, I have a difficult time pretending that the old system was somehow sacred or that the sport hasn’t been changing its definition of a legitimate championship for decades. We went from championships determined by polls to the BCS, from the BCS to four teams and from four teams to 12. At every step, there were warnings that college football was sacrificing something essential about its identity. Some of those concerns proved legitimate, while others were eventually absorbed into the way fans experienced the sport.
The more significant concern, to me, is that college football’s governing philosophy increasingly seems to begin with the question of how much revenue can be generated, rather than what kind of competitive structure makes the most sense for the sport itself.
That does not mean administrators are wrong to consider the financial implications. College athletics is operating in a very different economic environment than it was even five years ago. Direct payments to athletes, increasing travel demands, escalating coaching salaries and the continued financial pressures facing athletic departments all create legitimate reasons to pursue new revenue. It would be unrealistic to expect university administrators to ignore a potentially substantial financial opportunity simply because the traditional structure feels more familiar.
Still, there ought to be some point at which the people responsible for college football ask whether maximizing the value of television inventory is the same thing as maximizing the long-term value of the sport. Those are not necessarily identical objectives, and the distinction becomes more important every time the postseason expands.
For now, the answer seems relatively clear. The networks see a product that continues to deliver audiences, the conferences see a way to generate more money and the institutions see another opportunity to support an increasingly expensive athletic enterprise. If the financial projections make sense, the competitive arguments will eventually be arranged around the economic decision rather than the other way around.
And fans, regardless of how they feel about the changes, will almost certainly continue to watch.
That might be the most important part of this entire conversation. College football does not need fans to approve of every decision it makes. It only needs them to remain emotionally invested enough to keep showing up, buying tickets and turning on their televisions.
So while the debate over 24 teams will be presented as a disagreement about fairness, access and the integrity of the regular season, I suspect those are largely secondary considerations. The real argument is about the value of another dozen playoff games and how much money the people controlling the sport can extract from an audience that has shown remarkably little willingness to walk away.
The fans may not want 24 teams. The sport may not need 24 teams. But if the networks believe they can make more money with 24 teams, we probably already know how this story ends.
The only question is what college football will eventually have to give up in exchange.