Barring something unforeseen in modern society (business interests valuing the consumer experience over maximum profit), the College Football Playoff will be expanding to 24 teams for the 2027 season. Just as when the NCAA Tournament expanded from 68 to 76 teams, virtually no fans of the sport asked for this football postseason expansion, yet it plowed ahead, making the product worse for its most loyal supporters in order to extract more value from them. Textbook enshitification.
There is a justification for the expansion to a 24-team CFP in FBS football, and it involves programs essentially in Penn State's exact situation: an upper mid-tier power conference contender spending at unprecedented levels and likely to, more often than not, see no return on that investment at season’s end, as bowl games have long been a remnant of a bygone era.
The Power Conferences need to keep their mid-tier teams believing they have a chance
By The Athletic’s roster budget reporting, there are 28 teams in college football spending, on the high end of their estimate, $30 million. In total, 41 teams are spending up to $25 million. If only 12 teams, and really only 11 with one sport reserved for the Group of Six, have access to any meaningful result, it’s hard to imagine that level of investment continuing in perpetuity.
If, of the 68 teams in the Power 4, about 65-70% of them have little-to-no realistic hope of a meaningful return on their investment, a large portion of that group will start to question whether or not it’s worth investing at all. As we’ve seen with the growing gap between the Power 4 and the Group of 6, further consolidation of financial resources will create a worse TV product to sell for these conferences.
Revenue-sharing can only go so far to level the playing field when the revenue-sharing cap for an entire athletic department is around $21 million and the most expensive rosters in the sport this year are more than double that. And, legally, it’s impossible to limit that spending without either the antitrust exemption many of the power brokers in the sport are begging Congress to provide, or, preferably, employment and collective bargaining.
The Big Ten and the SEC especially need to keep giving programs like Penn State, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and the middle- to upper-middle-class of the conference, which are not on the level of Ohio State, Oregon, and Michigan financially, an incentive to keep their programs competitive so the product on the field each week is compelling.
Consolidation of who is paying the players, not the fact that schools are paying players, is the real existential threat to the sport. At least that’s how the Big Ten views it and what they convinced the SEC of. And to that end, increased CFP access is the only carrot the sport has to dangle.
What college football fans want never crosses the decision-makers' minds
For fans, however, the expanded CFP continues a trend of college sports expecting fans to foot the bill for unprecedentedly rapid growth without their interest in mind. College football has long been a regular-season sport, and once you open Pandora’s playoff box, expansion is almost always the only way to recoup the value lost from the decreased significance of the regular season.
But with the 12-team CFP, imperfect as it was, college football seemed to have found something of a Goldilocks zone for the fan experience, meeting the flattening at the top of the sport produced by NIL and the transfer portal with meaningfully increased access while maintaining the feeling of importance with each week of the regular season.
The 12-team format meant more games of significance down the stretch of the regular season, growing ratings in a time when live sports is the king of terrestrial television, and still largely no threat of Michigan and Ohio State resting their starters for The Game, as they both have bigger fish to fry in the postseason.
For all the cries to Congress to save college sports, college football is thriving like never before, and the sport is willing to hastily risk that by doubling the CFP amid a season when it’s unclear if there are even five teams worthy of competing for a national championship, let alone 12 or 24.
Some of its reasoning may be justified, and in the end, 24 might be the right number. But to rush this process so recklessly has the potential to fundamentally shake the foundation of what makes a fall Saturday so special all across the country and further alienate the loyal fans it’s trusting to foot the bill for this rapid professionalization with increased ticket prices, repeated calls for donations, and the general tone that if the team is losing, it’s the fanbases' fault for not forking over more money.
But that doesn't matter, because they don't care what you think. They only care that you'll watch, and they're betting that you will. But to blame the consumer's willingness to hold on to the thing that they love for its ever-deteriorating quality is to exempt the stakeholders of responsibility for their willingness, or even their outright desire to stripmine something so sacred in American society with blatant disregard for anything other than financial outcomes.
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