playBill ConnellyOct 16, 2026, 01:18 PM ETCloseBill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsFor more than 50 years, we argued about it. Starting around 1960 with Northwestern athletic director Stu Holcomb’s proposal for a “World Series” of college football — six conference champions and the top two independents playing a three-round tournament, all finished by Jan. 1 — the din of a playoff debate was never far in the distance.
Because a lot of the most influential people in the college football industry (namely, bowl directors) benefited handsomely from the bowl system, we didn’t get one until 2014.College football long made a habit of moving far too slowly, be it toward a fair system for determining a national title or toward fairly compensating players. But now the gas pedal is stuck, and we’re flying down the highway at ridiculous speeds. We cannot stop changing things. Conference realignment gave us supersized and geographically nonsensical conferences.
We’ve gone from (legally) paying players $0 per year (plus educational benefits) to amassing over $40 million rosters. And starting in 2027, we’ll have a playoff six times bigger than the one we got just 12 years ago. Unlike when that one came around, very few people were clamoring for this one.According to ESPN’s Pete Thamel and Heather Dinich, the College Football Playoff and ESPN are nearing a deal to expand the playoff in 2027. Whether any of us likes it or not, it’s coming.
Let’s talk about why, what this changes and how it will impact the way we watch the game.I’ve made it clear what I think about thisBack in May, when the push for 24-team inevitability got rolling, I shared plenty of thoughts on the matter. Some bullet points:The entire college football industry is built around the TV ratings pulled by huge games (most of them in the regular season) played in front of huge crowds. Voluntarily making those games less important, while also rapidly raising ticket prices and pressure on donors to donate, is playing with fire. All the complaints from playoff skeptics in the past — about the damaged integrity of the regular season, not to mention the harm to bowls, would ring dramatically true in a way it didn’t with a four- or 12-team CFP.The logistical puzzle of adding a fifth playoff round when you haven’t even mastered four yet — and when your December-January calendar is already its own mess that should be figured out — is an unnecessary complication.Although big playoffs at the lower levels of college football can be delightful, every other level includes conference champions, but we’re not doing that.
There’s no room for the MAC champion when an 8-4 Big Ten team needs to be rewarded for how much money it’s spending.We’re going from handing out 15-20 mulligans per year (that’s approximately the number of combined losses teams in the 12-team CFP have) to 45-50. We’re therefore lowering the stakes for about 30 extra games per year — featuring really good teams, no less — and we’re replacing that with higher stakes for lesser teams.As part of the trade-off for adding an extra round, conferences are evidently going to ditch their title games. There are ways around that, as I’ll talk about below, but ditching them means getting rid of even more in-season jeopardy.There are three main (and at least semi-legitimate) arguments I’ve seen for a 24-teamer. I just don’t think they’re good enough.1.
If we’re rewarding more teams with playoff berths, it could tamp down a coaching carousel that seems to be getting crazier and louder. (There’s a reason the only people I heard really arguing for a 24-teamer, before Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, were coaches.) Here’s a reminder that Penn State fired James Franklin half a season after he came within about a minute of the national title game. It will take about two or three years for a coach to get fired after a first-round loss. Simply making the CFP will become less important every year.2. When Petitti went on his PR campaign to win hearts and minds for 24, he emphasized that if teams have more margin for error, they’ll schedule more exciting nonconference games.
“We need to play more good games,” he said. “We get the 24-team playoff, you’re going to see many more competitive games scheduled. We’ll commit to that.” Of course, people said the same thing about a four- and 12-team playoff, and as it turned out, the motivation to simply schedule wins won out. It always will.Beyond that, even if there is a shift in scheduling philosophy, it won’t have a quick effect — of the 34 teams in the Big Ten and SEC, 31 are booked up for 2027, 24 are full for 2028 and 14 are maxed out for 2029.3.
Finally, there’s access. As plenty of people have noted, if a 24-team playoff had been installed in 2014, 80 different teams would have made it at least once in the past 12 seasons. Fair play: I’ve long shouted about the need for better access to a playoff, and this is access. But it’s almost exclusively going to be access for programs from conferences that have long since rigged the game in their favor.
When the World Cup expanded, it gave the vast majority of new bids to what you might call soccer’s underserved populations. They were rewarded with a bounty of magical underdog stories. If Petitti were in charge of World Cup expansion, he’d have given 36 of the 48 World Cup bids to European teams.Simulating the past 5 yearsTo get the best feel for what we’re getting ourselves into, I’ve found it’s best to look into the past. Here are what the past five CFPs would have looked like had they all been 24-teamers drawn from the end-of-regular-season CFP rankings.With Covid-era eligibility oddities, fluctuating depth charts and all sorts of other things, we’d have gotten quite a few mid-majors into the 2021 field, led by unbeaten Cincinnati.
But with Georgia comfortably the best team in the country, the Bulldogs would have had a 46% chance of still winning the title, per SP+, followed by Alabama (18%) and Ohio State (16%). Sixteen of 24 teams would have been under 1%.With no conference title game, Lincoln Riley’s USC Trojans would have fooled everyone into thinking they’re contenders all the way to the 2022 playoff, when they’d have likely lost to Texas or a torrid Florida State in the second round. The mid-major bids would have dried up a bit, with only two Group of 5 teams reaching the field, and Georgia (33%), Alabama (19%), Michigan (18%) and Ohio State (16%) entering the CFP with decent title odds, per SP+. Seventeen of 24 teams, including USC, would have been under 1%.Per SP+, Michigan and Georgia (which poetically got upset by Nick Saban’s last Alabama team in the SEC championship game in real life) were by far the two best teams in the country in 2023, and they would have entered as title favorites — UGA at 28%, per SP+, and Michigan at 25%.
Oregon (13%) and Ohio state (11%) would have led the next rung of contenders. And hey, with more than four teams in the field, unbeaten Florida State no longer would have gotten screwed! Only one G5 team would have made it. Eleven teams would have had a title chance under 1%.Two of 2024’s most enjoyable stories — Curt Cignetti’s Indiana and Ashton Jeanty’s Boise State — would have gotten opportunities to not only make the CFP but win some games.
Lane Kiffin’s best Ole Miss team would have gotten in, too, with a chance to make some noise; to me, the Rebels were proof that the 12-team playoff still features a good amount of regular-season jeopardy. They were fantastic, but they dropped three tight games and were eliminated no more.This would have been the most wide-open 24-teamer yet, with Ohio State leading the way at only a 23% title chance, per SP+, and four other teams at 10-15%. Twelve teams still would have started out under 1%.Notre Dame was to 2025 what Ole Miss was to 2024, but the Irish would have safely been
