Greg McElroy sees 16-team College Football Playoff as an inevitability

After a decade with four teams, the College Football Playoff expanded to 12 prior to the 2024 season. Now, less than a year later, the entire college football world is already anticipating further expansion ahead of 2026.

What that ultimately looks like remains up for debate, with the CFP management committee — made up of the 10 FBS conference commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua — set to meet in person on June 18 to evaluate several options. The two most discussed models are the Big 12- and SEC-backed “5+11” format involving the five highest-ranked conference champions and 11 at-large bids, and the Big Ten-backed “4-4-2-2-1” format that would give the Big Ten and SEC four automatic qualifying (AQ) bids apiece and the ACC and Big 12 two bids apiece. Of course, both of those proposed formats would usher in the era of a 16-team College Football Playoff, a reality ESPN analyst and former Alabama quarterback Greg McElroy calls “an inevitability.”

“We are all now kind of acknowledging that it feels like a 16-team playoff is an inevitability,” McElroy said on the latest episode of his Always College Football podcast. “Like there’s been speculation about maintaining 12 or maybe going to 14, but now it’s almost like … ‘let’s just go straight to 16.’ Let’s stop wasting time, let’s stop trying to take it a little at a time, let’s stop trying to figure out the two teams that get byes, will they be Big Ten or SEC or vice versa. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just get rid of (byes).

“If anything, we learned last year that byes really aren’t that advantageous, especially when you take into account that all four teams that had a first-round bye lost in their first game of the College Football Playoff last year. I think getting to 16 makes the most sense,” McElroy continued. “We’re now going to have more home playoff games, which I couldn’t be more in favor of. You’re going to be able to reward the No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 overall seeds because they’ll play the three ‘weakest’ teams in the field when looking at how it’s all going to structure, assuming the straight seeding model continues to be as follows.”

Greg Sankey reaffirms his stance of no automatic bids for College Football Playoff

As SEC commissioner, Greg Sankey remains among the most influential voices in college football, and a preeminent decision-maker when it comes to how the future of college athletics will look. It’s because of that authority that Sankey’s opinion about the next iteration of the expanded College Football Playoff carries more weight than almost any other.

Coming out of last week’s 2025 SEC Spring Meetings in Destin, Fla., Sankey put the league’s support behind a Big 12-backed “5+11” 16-team model for the expanded CFP that features 11 at-large bids along with the five highest-ranked conference champions. It was in direct opposition to the Big Ten-backed “4-4-2-2-1” 16-team model that granted four automatic bids for both the Big Ten and SEC and two apiece for the ACC and Big 12, which the latter two leagues have thoroughly rejected.

For his part, Sankey made it clear he’s never been in support of “automatic bids.”

“I’ve been one that said over time, I’d give no allocation. … I’d just make it the 12 best teams. And I was clear on that,” Sankey said on Monday’s Dan Patrick Show on Peacock. “Now, when we get into rooms, we make political compromises if you will … to achieve an outcome. … But we spent so much time expanding and working through our own little side arguments — about teams, and aw we can’t do this, we need this, you’ve got to protect this bowl game or that bowl game — that we never went back to the essence of decision-making, which is how are teams selected.”