College Football Playoff reveals details on future 12-team format
The College Football Playoff committee made it official Friday, announcing its plans to expand to 12 teams. In the announcement, it revealed more details about the new-look format.
The 12-team playoff will feature six conference champions and the next six highest-ranked teams. The top four teams will get a bye, while the other eight teams play first-round games at campus sites. Quarterfinal and semifinal games will, in turn, be played at bowl game sites pending agreements with the bowls.
Additionally, the playoff can start in either the second or third weekend of December, and the committee called for “at least 12 days between the conference championship games and the first-round games.”
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Expansion talks heated up this week and culminated in a CFP Board of Managers meeting on Friday to vote on a 12-team format. The vote was unanimous, and it’s now a matter of when expansion will start. The CFP’s current contract with ESPN runs through 2025, but conversations could start soon about potentially expanding earlier than that — maybe as soon as 2024, according to Sports Illustrated.
College Football Playoff Board of Managers unanimously votes to expand to 12 teams
The College Football Playoff will officially change following the decision today by the Board of Managers to expand to 12 teams. With discussions of expansion heating up over the last several weeks, the format will now include a dozen programs. Now it’s about when this format could take effect.
The meeting was first reported by SI’s Ross Dellenger. ESPN’s Pete Thamel was then one of the first to report the decision. The 11 committee members voted unanimously to officially expand the playoff. He said, as of now, the changes will not take place until the 2026 season after ESPN’s contract with the CFP expires following the 2025 playoffs.
However, the changes are reportedly open to happening as soon as 2024 or 2025 due to the unanimity of the vote according to Dellenger. That doesn’t guarantee expansion will happen, though, but is a potential with the main focus still on 2026. In the end, Thamel says money was a major factor in the outcome and could drive decision makers to apply this format to begin earlier than the 2026 goal.