College Football Playoff executives are preparing for their annual meeting ahead of the national championship game, and the sport’s two super conferences, the Big Ten and the SEC, are, once again, stuck in a stalemate. With neither side expected to budge on their proposal for the future of the College Football Playoff, according to Brandon Marcello's report for CBS, we are likely heading to another year of a 12-team CFP in 2026.
The SEC, with the backing of the Big 12 and ACC, is proposing a 16-team format that features automatic bids for the five-highest-ranked conference champions and 11 at-large spots. Even with three of the four power conferences on one side, the proposal cannot pass without the Big Ten because it has a controlling interest in the CFP, along with the SEC.
And what does the Big Ten want? Well, it would settle for a 16-team CFP for three years, a compromise if the other leagues are willing to agree to a 24-team format for 2029 and beyond. That three-year gap between the 12-team playoff and the jump to the Big Ten’s ultimate goal of 24 would give the sport time to deal with pesky scheduling issues like conference championship games.
The exact format of that 24-team setup is not known, but regardless, the proposal doubles the field and would make a CFP appearance, once the thing Penn State fans so desperately coveted, ultimately meaningless.
The Big Ten’s 24-team CFP plan would ruin the regular season
TV deals for sports leagues are driven largely by the postseason package. The more postseason inventory you have to sell, the more money you can make, and that’s the Big Ten’s No. 1 interest. There’s a cost to those decisions, however, which we’ve seen in the NFL, NBA, and even the MLB, which finally expanded its playoff system: the regular season just doesn’t matter anymore.
College basketball knows this with its 68-team tournament, which is frustratingly contemplating expansion as well. Once you expand the playoffs, there is always a desire to keep expanding them, and before you know it, the playoffs are all that matters, and you spend the next decade or so trying to figure out how to fix the regular season.
College football has always been a regular-season sport, and the 12-team CFP, in a lot of ways, has enhanced that. It’s just the right amount where significantly more games and teams matter down the stretch of the season that would have been meaningless in the four-team CFP or BCS eras, but a loss is still impactful.
If you expand to 24 teams, the best teams can take even three or four losses and still have a spot ensured in the CFP. That’s ludicrous. It would ruin the regular season altogether and distill the entire meaning of the sport into a win-or-go-home postseason format. Sure, that would be exhilarating and would undoubtedly rate highly, but why watch the rest of the year? That’s without mentioning all the coaching carousel chaos that would undoubtedly devolve the proceedings into chaos.
Penn State isn’t even the Big Ten’s perennial powerhouse, and the Nittany Lions would have made the 24-team field in seven of the last 10 years. It would be the expectation, even more so than it is in the 12-team era. The season would start in December for college football’s elite, and what a sad state of affairs that would be.