College football has never really been about football. It's always been about money, power, geography, and the very human desire to have more of all three. So when the CFP governance committee descended on Dallas this week for its annual spring meetings, the agenda item everyone circled in red wasn't conference realignment or eligibility reform. It was the number 24 — as in the 24 teams that a growing coalition of commissioners, billionaires, media executives, and at least one presidential advisory group believe should populate the next College Football Playoff.
This isn't just an expansion debate anymore. It's a full-blown political and financial chess match, and the pieces are moving fast.
How We Got Here
Let's rewind. The 12-team CFP just completed its second full season — a format that, by most accounts, was a massive hit. Ratings were up, drama was off the charts, and Indiana somehow won a national championship and made the whole sport feel alive again. You'd think the logical move would be to let the new format breathe before blowing it up.
Instead, the sport's power brokers are already arguing about what comes next.
The push toward 24 teams didn't emerge in a vacuum. It's rooted in a phenomenon that has turned college athletics upside down: the NIL arms race. Schools across the country are hemorrhaging money trying to keep up in a landscape where top players can command millions before they ever play a college snap. Financially stressed programs are looking for any lever they can pull, and a bigger playoff — one generating hundreds of millions in additional revenue — looks like a lifeline.
A 14-person presidential "media" committee, backed by the White House, has been holding real conversations about the future of the postseason, identifying a larger playoff as one of the primary vehicles for generating revenue for financially struggling schools. That committee — which includes conference commissioners from the Big 12, Big Ten, SEC, ACC, and American, alongside Notre Dame's athletic director — overlaps significantly with the actual CFP governance committee. It also includes media executives from ESPN and Fox, a Republican political strategist tied to President Trump, and Texas billionaire Cody Campbell, who is leading a federal campaign to overhaul college sports.
In other words: the federal government didn't get invited to this party. It bought the venue.
24 Is Gaining Ground — But One Man Is the Wall
During a recent presidential committee meeting, at least three of the four power conference commissioners — along with Notre Dame — expressed either outright support for or a willingness to seriously explore a 24-team playoff format. That's a significant shift. As recently as January, a chunk of that same room was aligned behind the SEC's preferred 16-team model.
Three months is an eternity in college football politics, apparently.
As one high-placed stakeholder put it: "I think it's accurate to say that there is a coalescing around 24."
The holdout? SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, the sport's most powerful individual — conspicuously absent from the recent call where momentum was building.
Sankey's resistance isn't irrational. A 24-team playoff likely kills conference championship games, and the SEC's title game alone is valued at roughly $80 million annually. Sankey has previously voiced public support for a 16-team format that would preserve conference championship weekend, which he argues maintains the value of the regular season. When your cash cow is worth $80 million, you don't just hand it over to the expansion mob without a fight.
But cracks are forming in the SEC's internal wall. Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne and Georgia head coach Kirby Smart have both publicly voiced openness to eliminating the conference championship game — which is essentially the philosophical concession that makes 24 teams viable. When Kirby Smart — who has more to lose than almost anyone from a diluted regular season — is floating that idea publicly, the ground is shifting.
The SEC's move to a nine-game conference schedule has only deepened the friction. Auburn athletic director John Cohen stated plainly that the expectation of every athletic director in the SEC was that a nine-game schedule would be paired with at least a 16-team playoff field. Ole Miss chancellor Glenn Boyce went further, saying he wouldn't have voted for the expanded conference slate if he'd known playoff expansion wouldn't follow.
That kind of internal pressure doesn't go away. It compounds.
The Media War Nobody's Talking About Loudly Enough
Here's where things get genuinely interesting — and a little dirty.
ESPN currently holds broadcast rights for every game in the 12-team CFP format through 2032, a portion of which it has sublicensed to TNT. Reportedly, ESPN is contractually entitled to all playoff games up to a 14-team format — but if expansion goes beyond 14 teams, those additional games could hit the open market.
That's an enormous financial exposure for the Worldwide Leader, which is already dealing with a complicated sports-rights landscape. And it explains why, behind the scenes, ESPN's brass has reportedly been far less enthusiastic about 24 teams than their colleagues at Fox.
Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks publicly endorsed a 24-team playoff format — a position that aligns with the Big Ten, whose media package Fox holds, and whose broadcast season currently ends after Thanksgiving outside of the Holiday Bowl. A 24-team playoff is a direct path to Fox broadcasting postseason college football for the first time. Of course they want 24.
ESPN executives have privately dismissed the notion of a 24-team playoff, for reasons that are pretty transparent when you follow the money. Keeping the playoff small keeps it inside ESPN's existing contractual tent. Every team you add beyond 14 is a game that could end up on a competitor's airwaves.
This isn't a philosophical debate about the integrity of the regular season. It's a cold, corporate tug-of-war between two media giants using their conference allies as proxies. The SEC aligns with ESPN. The Big Ten aligns with Fox. And 24 versus 16 is really just the battlefield they've chosen to fight on.
The Real Stakes: What a 24-Team Playoff Actually Means
Strip away the politics for a moment and think about what a 24-team field actually does to the sport.
It means more programs have a legitimate shot at a national title. It means a team that loses a conference championship game on a fluke doesn't necessarily go home. It means Group of Five schools get more than a token invite. It means the regular season — which college football has always marketed as playoff football every week — becomes slightly more forgiving.
Whether that's good or bad depends entirely on your worldview. Purists will howl. Fans of mid-major programs will celebrate. Athletic directors running $50 million deficits will quietly exhale.
The format under discussion would generate hundreds of millions in additional revenue, completely reshape both the regular season and the postseason, and potentially alter the financial trajectory of the entire sport. For schools drowning in NIL obligations and roster management costs, that's not an abstraction. It's a survival question.
The Path Forward: Not As Clear As It Looks
Here's the sobering reality check amid all this momentum: none of it matters unless the Big Ten and SEC agree.
Per the memorandum of understanding signed by all FBS conferences and Notre Dame in 2024, both the Big Ten and SEC must sign off on any new CFP format before it can be implemented. The presidential committee can recommend whatever it wants to the White House. Fox and ESPN can wage proxy wars through their respective conferences. Commissioners can make noise in Dallas hotel rooms for 15 hours straight.
Until Greg Sankey and the SEC look at 24 and say yes, the number stays hypothetical.
But the velocity of public momentum — SEC coaches, athletic directors, chancellors, and even rival conference commissioners all trending toward the larger format — suggests that Sankey's resistance may be increasingly lonely. You can only hold the dam so long before the pressure finds a crack.
The Closing Take
College football has always been a sport that evolves in fits and starts — two steps forward, one step backward, followed by someone in a conference office burning the whole map and drawing a new one. The CFP went from two teams to four to 12 in less than 15 years. Twenty-four felt radical two seasons ago. Right now, it feels almost inevitable.
The real question isn't whether the playoff gets to 24. It's whether the people who control it can get their stories straight — and their financial incentives aligned — before the sport spirals into another decade of paralysis by committee.
Money almost always wins in college athletics. When it finally does here, someone's going to have to explain to us all how the White House ended up in the room.
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