The College Football Playoff expansion is almost here.
According to ESPN — the network that owns the rights to broadcast the current 12-team playoffs — the CFP is “close to reaching an agreement” to double the size of the field to 24 teams and that the deal “is expected to close in the near future.”
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The 2026 season is the third year of the 12-team playoffs. The playoffs were implemented before the 2014 season and had four teams for its first 10 seasons.
Further expansion of the postseason has slowly become inevitable in recent months after the Big Ten and SEC argued over the future postseason format. ESPN’s current contract to televise the CFP runs through the 2031 season, and the network would purchase the additional games in the 24-team playoffs.
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ESPN currently sublicenses part of the playoffs to TNT, which has two first-round games, two quarterfinal games and one semifinal game this season.
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The last major obstacle to expansion was the future of conference championship games. The SEC conference title game is the most recognizable and lucrative of the bunch, and Commissioner Greg Sankey said this week at his conference’s basketball media days that a decision on expansion would likely come “sooner rather than later.”
Sankey likely spoke with knowledge of the impending deal. The SEC has slowly positioned itself on a larger playoff field.
The official deadline for changing next season’s playoff format is December 1, and meeting that deadline now appears to be a formality. The playoffs continued at 12 teams for a third season in 2026 after the Big Ten and SEC couldn’t figure out what they wanted an expanded field to look like.
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Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti initially pitched an expanded playoff field with a set number of automatic qualifiers for each conference.
As expansion negotiations continued, the four power conferences also aligned in their conference schedule. The SEC is in its first year of a nine-game conference schedule as each of the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC now play nine conference games and three non-conference games. The SEC also requires its members to play a power conference opponent (or Notre Dame) among its three non-conference games.
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