The inevitable is nearing its inevitable completion.
According to reports, the College Football Playoff will be expanding to 24 teams in the near future. The field will be expanded for the 2027 season.
The CFP and ESPN have been negotiating for a new TV deal based on the new playoff format that will lead to a “seismic move for the postseason that is also expected to eliminate the lucrative Power 4 conference championship games and start the season a week earlier.”
No final details have been announced but the 24-team field is expected to include 19 at-large bids, the Power 4 conference champions as determined by each league and the highest-ranked Group of 6 team.
As previously mentioned, expansion was always going to happen. Simply put, there’s too much money on the table to not expand. Whatever deal is reached between the CFP and ESPN will be in the billions.
CFP statement https://t.co/ZvhR8mmSpG pic.twitter.com/4cQBmJhfwB
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) October 15, 2026
So, like it or not, this was always going to happen and now it’s about to.
The reports also consistently mention the elimination of conference championship games.
That’s both a good and bad thing at the same time.
Monetary issues aside (because the SEC wouldn’t agree to 24 teams without ensuring it wouldn’t be losing money) there are some issues to consider.
The obvious issue is how do you determine who is the conference champion?
Conferences can’t put every team against one another, so there’ll have to be tiebreakers that go beyond head-to-head results.
Some conferences have tiebreakers for divisional standings but even those haven’t been exactly perfect.
Just last season Miami was left out of the ACC title game after finishing in a five-way tie at 6-2 in conference play.
Duke advanced to the championship game despite finishing only 7-5 overall, while the Hurricanes had a better overall record and did advance all the way to the national title game.
In 2023, the Big 12 had to clarify its multi-team tiebreaking procedures during the season because of confusion over how head-to-head victories applied when several tied teams hadn’t all played each other.
Can the conferences learn from those lessons (and a whole lot more) and make a better tiebreaker system? Or will they just use what they have?
Or maybe conferences have co-champions? However, that doesn’t fix everything.
Even if the SEC continued recognizing co-champions, it would still have to designate a single team for the CFP’s automatic berth. Unless the conference develops a different qualification mechanism, that could mean a title or automatic bid being decided by the results of teams that aren’t even involved in the tie.
And the same issue would exist in the Big Ten, ACC and Big 12.
That idea has also spectacularly backfired, too.
Back in 2014, Baylor and TCU both finished 8-1 in Big 12 play.
Baylor had beaten TCU 61-58, but the conference recognized both schools as co-champions.
The Big 12 had promoted its round-robin schedule with the slogan “One True Champion.” Instead, it had two champions, and neither made the inaugural four-team College Football Playoff.
And there’s a much more recent example that Ole Miss fans should remember.
Last season, Georgia, Alabama, Ole Miss and Texas A&M all finished 7-1 in SEC play. The conference’s tiebreaking procedures sent Georgia and Alabama to Atlanta, where the Bulldogs settled the championship on the field.
But what happens if there isn’t a championship game?
Does the SEC simply award the title to whichever team wins a tiebreaker based on the winning percentage of its conference opponents? Does it declare four co-champions? And if it does, which one gets the automatic playoff berth?
Sure, in a 24-team playoff, all four teams would probably make the field anyway.
But that’s beside the point.
We’re not just talking about deciding who gets into the playoff. We’re talking about deciding who gets to call itself the Southeastern Conference champion.
And there isn’t an easy solution.
Head-to-head results are great until the teams involved haven’t played one another. Common opponents make sense until the schedules don’t have enough in common. Strength of schedule sounds reasonable until a championship comes down to how well somebody else’s opponents played in November.
None of those methods are perfect, and the conferences aren’t going to find some magical formula that makes everyone happy.
Perhaps the lesson to learn here is that in college football will never be perfect and there’ll always be something for someone to complain about.
