College Football Playoff to Expand to 24 Teams in 2027 as ESPN Strikes $1.7 Billion Deal and Conference Title Games End

The College Football Playoff will expand to 24 teams from the 2027 season, doubling the size of the field in the biggest restructuring of American college football’s postseason since the playoff was created, after ESPN and the playoff’s organisers agreed a new five-year broadcast deal worth nearly $1.7 billion, according to Reuters.

The agreement, announced on Monday, 9 November, also ends the conference championship games of the four most powerful leagues in the sport — the SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 — bringing down the curtain on a fixture that has been part of the college football calendar for more than three decades. The 2026 season, which is already under way, will be the last played under the current 12-team format, and this season’s conference title games will be the final ones.

Under the new format, the champions of the four Power Four conferences will qualify automatically, alongside the highest-ranked champion from the six other major conferences — the American, Conference USA, the MAC, the Mountain West, the Pac-12 and the Sun Belt — and 19 at-large teams chosen from the selection committee’s final rankings. The top eight seeds will receive first-round byes and host second-round games on their own campuses, while seeds nine to 16 will host first-round games against seeds 17 to 24, with the winners advancing to meet the top seeds.

In total, 16 of the 23 playoff games will be played on college campuses, up from four in the current 12-team bracket, before the tournament moves to the traditional New Year’s Six bowl games for the quarter-finals and semi-finals. The first championship game of the expanded era will be played on Monday, 24 January 2028, at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in New Orleans, with Tampa Bay hosting the following year’s final on 22 January 2029.

“We will make the 24-team Playoff spectacular for the fans, student-athletes, their institutions and all our stakeholders. That is our commitment,” Rich Clark, the executive director of the College Football Playoff, said in a statement. “Our organisation delivers a world-class championship experience at our games and our events, and this promise will continue under the new format. Twenty-three games of Playoff football, featuring 24 ranked teams going head-to-head for the right to be crowned the true national champion.”

The playoff said in its own statement that the decision to expand was “driven by a desire to increase opportunities for FBS programs, student-athletes and fan bases to participate in the Playoff and have a chance to play for the CFP National Championship, while new scheduling standards incentivise institutions to schedule more compelling non-conference matchups during the regular season.”

ESPN, which already holds the exclusive broadcast rights to the playoff under a six-year, $7.8 billion contract signed in March 2024 that runs through the 2031-32 season, will pay an average of $345 million a year extra for the expanded field, according to Reuters. The network’s chairman, Jimmy Pitaro, said: “We remain firmly committed to elevating it in its new, expanded 24-team format.” All 23 games will air on ESPN or ABC, although ESPN retains the right to sublicense some of the new games to other broadcasters.

The deal was reported first by ESPN’s Heather Dinich, and was confirmed by the playoff’s own announcement on Monday. It follows a statement from the College Football Playoff on Friday, 6 November, that a formal agreement was in the final stages, after months of negotiation between the two sides.

The New Format in Detail

The 24-team bracket is a substantial departure from the structure college football has used since the playoff expanded from four teams to 12 in 2024. The playoff began in the 2014 season with just four teams earning the right to play for the national championship. The 12-team era lasted only three seasons before the organisers decided to double the field again.

The first two rounds of the new tournament will be played at the home stadiums of the higher seeds, on Thursday through Saturday of the relevant weeks, which means campus crowds will host playoff football on a scale the sport has never seen. The top eight seeds, after their first-round byes, will host second-round games. Seeds nine to 16 will host first-round ties, with number nine facing number 24 and the winner advancing to play number eight, and so on down the bracket.

The quarter-finals and semi-finals will remain at the New Year’s Six bowl games — the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, Peach, Orange and Cotton bowls — which have hosted the later rounds since the playoff’s inception. According to the schedule published by the playoff, the quarter-finals will be played on Friday, 31 December 2027, at the Sugar Bowl, and on Saturday, 1 January 2028, at the Fiesta, Peach and Rose bowls. The semi-finals will follow on Thursday, 13 January 2028, at the Orange Bowl and Friday, 14 January 2028, at the Cotton Bowl.

The regular season itself will change shape. Under the agreement, the season will begin for all teams in the week before Labor Day — traditionally known as Week Zero, when only a limited number of games are played — and will conclude on Thanksgiving weekend. The selection committee will announce the first 24-team field on Sunday, 28 November 2027, the day after Thanksgiving, and the playoff will begin in the first full week of December.

Notre Dame, which plays as an independent and belongs to no conference, receives no guaranteed route into the field. The Fighting Irish must be ranked high enough to earn one of the 19 at-large places, a point the playoff’s announcement made explicit. That is a significant detail for one of the most prominent programmes in the sport, and one that will be watched closely in the seasons ahead.

The annual Army-Navy game, one of the oldest fixtures in American sport, will not be disrupted by the new calendar. It will be played as a standalone game on 4 December, the weekend that used to host the conference championship games, and it will not affect the playoff rankings even if Army or Navy is one of the 24 teams selected. The Heisman Trophy, awarded to the best player in college football, will be presented later that same night, with Heisman weekend moving up a week to 3-5 December 2027.

The playoff has also adopted new scheduling standards designed to push schools towards stronger fixtures. Power Four programmes must play at least 10 games against other Power Four opponents to be eligible for the playoff, a rule intended to discourage the soft non-conference schedules that have long been a feature of the sport. According to Sports Illustrated, nearly every school already meets that mark, with 57 of the 68 Power Four programmes having at least one such non-conference game set for 2027.

The End of the Conference Championship Game

The most emotional consequence of the deal is the disappearance of the conference championship game, a fixture that has produced some of the most memorable weekends in college football for a generation. The SEC announced on Monday that its championship game, first played in 1992, will end after its 35th and final edition in December 2026.

“The SEC Football Championship Game has been a defining event in college football for more than three decades, producing unforgettable moments and crowning legendary champions,” SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said in a statement. “What began with the vision and leadership of Commissioner Roy Kramer in 1992 helped reshape the landscape of college football and established a tradition that has endured for 35 years. As the sport evolves with an expanded College Football Playoff, we look forward to celebrating the remarkable legacy of this event with its 35th and final edition and recognising the city of Atlanta, Mercedes-Benz Stadium and AMB Sports and Entertainment, and the many partners who have contributed to its success.”

The Big Ten followed shortly afterwards. Its championship game, played since 2011, will also end after this season, with the final edition scheduled for 5 December in Indianapolis. “As we look ahead to a new College Football Playoff format, the Big Ten Conference is deeply grateful to the City of Indianapolis, the Indiana Sports Corp, Lucas Oil Stadium and the hundreds of thousands of fans who helped make the Big Ten Football Championship Game a marquee event each season since its inception in 2011,” Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti said in a statement. The conference added that it looked forward to its final championship game on 5 December and to maintaining its relationship with Indianapolis for future championships in other sports.

From 2027, the champions of the four Power Four conferences will be decided by regular-season standings and each league’s established tie-breaking procedures, rather than by a winner-takes-all title game. The ACC and Big 12 title games will also end, according to reports of the deal.

The politics of the decision were shaped by a long-running disagreement between the two most powerful conferences. According to USA Today, the SEC resisted the 24-team move until October, while the Big Ten pushed for it. Petitti drove the 24-team model and accepted the trade-off months ago. “Yeah, I think it’s pretty much we won’t be playing a championship game if we go to 24,” he said in July at Big Ten media days. Sankey, by contrast, initially favoured a 12- or 16-team field that would have kept his league’s title game. But the Big Ten and SEC hold authority over format decisions, and both ultimately signed off on the new arrangement.

Not everyone in the sport is convinced. Nick Saban, the former Alabama coach who won seven national championships, criticised the expansion last week on the “New Heights” podcast, hosted by Jason and Travis Kelce. “There’s not 24 teams in the country that can win the national championship,” Saban said. “There’s a lot of pride in winning the conference championship. And we’re going to give that up to have an extra game, where the 24th team is going to play the ninth-best team. I’m not a big [proponent] of it.”

Fox Sports analyst Joel Klatt offered a different view, arguing that coaches had already soured on the title games. “It’s a tax on the best teams in the sport because they’ve got to go and play an extra heavyweight matchup that is not really going to impact them all that much,” Klatt said, according to Sports Illustrated.

The Money Behind the Deal

The financial scale of the agreement is striking even by the standards of American college sport. The nearly $1.7 billion in the new five-year deal sits on top of the $7.8 billion contract ESPN signed in March 2024, under which the network already pays an average of $1.3 billion a year for the playoff through the 2031-32 season. The expanded field adds an average of $345 million a year over the next five years, according to ESPN’s reporting.

The network’s actual cost is lower than the headline figure suggests. According to Sports Illustrated, ESPN gets back about $140 million a year because it owns the broadcast rights to the SEC, ACC and Big 12 title games, which will no longer be played, so it is effectively paying roughly $205 million a year for the new inventory of 12 additional playoff games. Fox, which owns the Big Ten Championship Game, is expected to get back about $50 million a year under its own arrangements.

Schools, however, will not see a windfall from the deal. Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported that Big Ten and SEC programmes stand to gain between $2.5 million and $3 million each a year, while ACC and Big 12 schools would add between $1 million and $1.5 million. In the context of athletic department budgets that routinely run into hundreds of millions of dollars, the new money is modest — a reminder that the expansion is driven less by a sudden influx of cash than by the strategic value of more playoff inventory and more teams with a stake in the postseason.

ESPN will remain the sole rights holder of the event, but it can sublicense six of the 12 new games to approved partners for exclusive distribution. ABC, ESPN’s broadcast sister network, will carry at least three first-round games, at least three second-round games, one quarter-final, one semi-final and the national championship game. Weeknight playoff games are also expected, because the NFL begins playing Saturday games during the third week of December, creating a scheduling squeeze that the playoff will have to navigate.

The deal was struck after a 30-day exclusive negotiating window between ESPN and the playoff that opened in September. The playoff confirmed on 9 October that the window had closed but that discussions were continuing, and on 6 November it said a decision was in its final stages. Monday’s announcement brought that process to a close.

How the Calendar Changes

The 2027 season will start a week earlier than usual, with the full slate of games beginning in the week before Labor Day. The regular season will end on Thanksgiving weekend, the committee will name the field on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the playoff will begin in the first full week of December, with the first two rounds played on campuses on Thursday through Saturday.

The championship game keeps its traditional Monday-night slot in late January, a date that has been fixed for some time: 24 January 2028 in New Orleans, and 22 January 2029 in Tampa Bay. The bowls retain their place at the heart of the tournament’s later stages, with the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, Peach, Orange and Cotton bowls hosting the quarter-finals and semi-finals, as they have since the playoff began.

For fans, the most visible change will be the sheer volume of playoff football. Sixteen games on college campuses means that, in December 2027, as many as 16 different universities will host a playoff game, bringing the postseason to student bodies and local communities that have never experienced it. The playoff’s own statement made a point of this, saying the expanded format “will feature 16 on-campus Playoff games, which will bring Playoff football to more students and local fans while providing a positive impact for campus communities.”

The current season offers a preview of what the new format would have meant. In the first College Football Playoff rankings of 2026, Ohio State landed at number 12, a position that would put the Buckeyes inside the range of first-round hosts under the 24-team model, according to Sports Illustrated. USA Today projected a hypothetical 24-team bracket from the first rankings, with Miami at number one, Georgia at two, Utah at three and Indiana at four — a reminder that the expanded field would have drawn in teams well beyond the traditional elite. The second unveiling of the 2026 rankings is set for Tuesday, 10 November, between 9 and 9:30 p.m. ET.

Analysis: Why It Matters

Access, at last — and its limits

The strongest argument for expansion is the one the playoff itself made: more teams, more fan bases and more campuses get a genuine stake in the postseason. The evidence for that argument is recent and concrete. Last season, a 10-win Notre Dame team missed the 12-team field by a single place, and a nine-win Texas team missed it by three. Under the new format, both would have been comfortably in. That is not a trivial change. For programmes outside the traditional elite — the second tier of the Power Four, and the best of the Group of Six — the difference between a 12-team field and a 24-team field is the difference between a season that ends in frustration and a season that ends with a home playoff game in December.

But Saban’s objection cannot be dismissed as mere nostalgia. There are not 24 teams in the country capable of winning a national championship, and almost certainly never will be. The first-round games between the ninth and 24th seeds will, in most years, be mismatches, and the tournament will produce more games that are decided long before the final whistle. The playoff’s defenders would argue that this misses the point: the value of the first round is not that the 24th seed might win the title, but that its players, students and supporters get to be part of the tournament at all. That is a real value, but it is a different kind of value from competitive balance, and the sport should be honest about which one it is buying.

The Big Ten wins the argument

The politics of this deal are as revealing as its structure. The Big Ten, under Tony Petitti, drove the 24-team model and was willing to sacrifice its own championship game to get it. The SEC, under Greg Sankey, preferred a smaller field that preserved the title game, and resisted until October. That the Big Ten’s vision prevailed tells us something important about where power now sits in college football: the two richest conferences hold joint authority over the format, but on this question the Big Ten’s preference — more access, more inventory, a regular-season champion decided by the table rather than a single game — carried the day.

There is a certain irony in the outcome. The SEC championship game, born in 1992 under Roy Kramer, was the original conference title game, the model every other league copied. Its final edition this December will be a moment of genuine history, and Sankey’s farewell statement read as such. But the logic that killed it is hard to argue with: once the playoff doubles in size, a conference title game becomes an extra, high-risk fixture for the two best teams in a league, played the week before the playoff begins, with little upside for either side. As Klatt put it, it had become a tax on the best teams. The leagues have chosen to tax them less and to spread the postseason more widely instead.

The money question

The financial details deserve a closer look, because they cut against the usual story of college sport as a gold rush. ESPN is paying a great deal of money in headline terms — nearly $1.7 billion over five years — but its net additional cost is roughly $205 million a year once the cancelled title games are accounted for, and the schools themselves will see only $1 million to $3 million each a year. That is a modest return for a change of this magnitude, and it suggests that the real prize for everyone involved is not the immediate cash but the long-term value of a bigger tournament: more games to sell, more fan bases engaged for longer, and a postseason that keeps more of the country watching into December and January.

For ESPN, the deal also locks in its position as the sport’s dominant broadcaster through 2031, at a moment when the rights market is being reshaped by streaming and by the growing financial power of the conferences themselves. The ability to sublicense six of the new games gives the network flexibility it did not have before, and ABC’s guaranteed share of the biggest games keeps the tournament on free-to-air television in the United States, which matters for its reach.

What the sport loses

Something real is being lost, and it is worth naming. The conference championship game was, for more than three decades, one of the great weekends in American sport: two teams, one trophy, a neutral stadium full of supporters, and a result that settled an argument. The SEC title game in Atlanta and the Big Ten title game in Indianapolis were institutions in their own right, and their final editions this December will be played in front of crowds who know they are watching the end of something.

What replaces them is a regular-season champion decided by the table and a tie-breaker — fair, certainly, but bloodless. The trade-off is deliberate: the sport has decided that a bigger, more inclusive playoff is worth more than the drama of a single championship Saturday. That may prove to be the right call. But it is a call with a cost, and the crowds in Atlanta and Indianapolis this December will feel it.

What this means for the teams

For coaches and athletic directors, the new world brings new incentives. The requirement that Power Four teams play 10 games against other Power Four opponents to be playoff-eligible will push schools towards stronger non-conference schedules, and the fact that 57 of the 68 programmes already have such a game set for 2027 suggests the shift is already under way. The era of the soft September schedule — three comfortable home wins against overmatched opponents before the conference season begins — is not over, but it is now harder to justify.

For players, the change is simpler and more welcome: more of them will play in the postseason, more of them will play a playoff game at home, and the season will last longer for more teams. A 24-team field means that a team ranked in the teens in late November still has everything to play for, which should keep more games meaningful deeper into the season. That is good for the sport’s competitive drama, even if it comes at the price of a few lopsided first-round games.

What to Watch Next

1. The final title games: The SEC Championship in Atlanta and the Big Ten Championship in Indianapolis on 5 December will be the last of their kind. Expect both leagues to mark the occasion, and expect the results to be read as the closing chapter of a 35-year tradition.
2. The 2026 rankings: The second unveiling of this season’s College Football Playoff rankings is set for Tuesday, 10 November, between 9 and 9:30 p.m. ET. The first rankings had Miami at number one, and the race for the 12-team field will now play out against the knowledge that next year the door opens far wider.
3. How the leagues pick their champions: With title games gone, each Power Four conference must settle its champion by regular-season standings and tie-breakers from 2027. Watch for disputes — and for the first time a tie-breaker, rather than a game, decides a championship.
4. Notre Dame’s position: With no guaranteed route into the field, the Fighting Irish must earn an at-large place on ranking alone. Their schedule, and their standing in the committee’s eyes, will be under closer scrutiny than ever.
5. The first 24-team bracket: The committee will announce the first expanded field on Sunday, 28 November 2027. The teams ranked 17th to 24th in that first list — the programmes that would never have been near the old field — will be the real test of whether expansion has changed the sport.
6. The broadcast picture: ESPN can sublicense six of the 12 new games. Which networks or streaming services pick them up, and what they pay, will show how much the expanded tournament is really worth beyond the headline deal.

Sources

• Reuters — “CFP, ESPN sign deal to expand to 24-team playoff with 2027 season”
• USA Today — “ESPN, CFP agree to 24-team playoff, but at what cost? Details of mega deal”
• Sports Illustrated — “College Football Playoff and ESPN Agree on 24-Team Expansion: All Details Explained”
• New York Post — “CFP expanding to 24 teams, big conference title games eliminated in $1.7 billion ESPN deal”
• TSN — “CFP, ESPN ink 5-year, $1.7B deal to expand field to 24 teams”