Amid the buzz about this season’s CFP, expansion talk has been a buzzkill

The biggest buzzkill about this season’s College Football Playoff has nothing to do with the teams squaring off today. The bittersweet part is that during the summer, we were given one Texas-sized tease that this event soon would blossom into something much more spectacular.

CFP expansion by 2024 was seen as a virtual guarantee. The committee was at the 1-yard line, closing in on tripling the event’s size to 12 teams. It was all gift-wrapped and waiting, a gluttony of playoff drama to be staged over four glorious weeks. Choose any metaphor you’d like; it was viewed as a near certainty — until it wasn’t.

It’s as if Santa, ever so briefly, gave us a glimpse of a beautiful, oversized presentation of gifts surrounding the Christmas tree just a few years down the line, and the next thing we know, it’s all yanked away amid squabbling over inventory, who gets what and even sunsets. As the CFP semifinals unfold today, the biggest question is whether it’s still safe to entertain visions of an even grander event on the horizon. The answer remains unknowable. 

We are far removed from the summer, when the proposed 12-team model was almost universally praised. The six highest-ranked conference champions would receive berths, along with the six highest-ranked at-large teams. Then came landscape-shifting conference realignment, which got many stakeholders’ dander up. And now the words most often mentioned in conversations about CFP expansion are “deadlocked,” “impasse,” “stalemate,” “division” and — most important — “running out of time.”

If there is any hope for the College Football Playoff to expand by 2024, the management committee of 10 conference commissioners and Notre Dame almost certainly would need to come to a unanimous agreement in their next meeting on January 10 in Indianapolis before forwarding its recommendation to the CFP Board of Managers. Absolutely nothing indicates that is likely. Divisions run deep.

The group’s meeting in Dallas earlier this month didn’t even yield a vote. And the fault lines within the group were expressed publicly during this month’s Learfield Intercollegiate Athletic Forum in Las Vegas.

Some commissioners (namely, the ACC’s Jim Phillips) want an eight-team model instead of the 12-team format, a possibility some commissioners (including the SEC’s Greg Sankey) reject. And a divide exists over who should receive automatic berths, with some commissioners (including the Big Ten’s Kevin Warren) endorsing the notion that all Power 5 champions should automatically qualify, much to the consternation of Group of 5 commissioners (namely, the AAC’s Mike Aresco).

Smaller issues also fester, including whether first-round games would be played on college campuses or at neutral bowl sites, as some high-ranking sources have endorsed. And then there’s “The Granddaddy of Them All” point of contention: The Rose Bowl wants to preserve its traditional New Year’s Day late-afternoon Eastern time slot. Thus far, its partners (the Pac-12’s George Kliavkoff and the Big Ten’s Warren) have the Rose Bowl’s back in what has been billed as the battle for Pasadena’s idyllic, unmistakable sunset. But if preserving that nationally televised sunset is the hill to die on for the Rose Bowl, sources said, a deal is possible that would award the game permanent CFP quarterfinal status. 

All of the circular debates over competing interests are playing out against the backdrop of the NCAA reimagining itself and rewriting its constitution, something at least one commissioner (Phillips) believes should prompt the committee to consider pausing until it can assess the new landscape. Also in play is the newest Power 5 commissioner (Kliavkoff) hinting that P5 leagues can move ahead with expansion plans for 2026 without support from Group of 5 leagues, a notion some commissioners (namely, Aresco) reject. 

Then there is one commissioner, the one with the most power (Sankey), who, while endorsing the original 12-team model, would be perfectly content with the four-team model in perpetuity because his money-flush league again finds itself with half the participants in this season’s field. Lost on no one is that the majority of P5 commissioners (Kliavkoff, Phillips and the Big 12’s Bob Bowlsby) don’t have a representative in this year’s CFP, with the Pac-12 going dark with a CFP presence since the Obama administration. And, finally, as battlelines are drawn, one esteemed commissioner (the Big 12’s Bowlsby) is giving the three newest P5 commissioners (Phillips, Warren and Kliavkoff) the side eye for creating some friction in the process, telling The Athletic, “We got some pushback because some guys don’t have a whole lot of sense of history. And so I don’t begrudge them that. It’s a lot to get up to speed on.”

Got all that? Consensus, there is not. 

And that leads to this impasse. If consensus cannot be reached next month, given the complexities surrounding aligning bowls and sites in 2024, then expansion likely would be tabled until the current 12-year CFP contract with ESPN expires following the 2025 season. Under that scenario, a reported nearly half-billion dollars in additional revenue could be left on the table. But stakeholders would have more time to hash out a model, not to mention take it to the open market and attract multiple TV partners for a highly attractive sports property.

“If we do want to expand the College Football Playoff prior to the 12-year term limit, it’s going to have to be done here quite readily within the next month or so,” Mountain West Conference commissioner Craig Thompson said at the Learfield event. 

Don’t hold your breath. Perhaps the biggest fundamental hurdle is agreeing on the size of expansion. Will the ACC’s Phillips budge on preferring the eight-team format? One prominent college athletics source with ties to the ACC told On3 that because the ACC is locked into its media rights deal with ESPN until 2036, the gap in rights revenue between the ACC and the top two leagues, the SEC and Big Ten, will continue to widen unless there was a way to re-open negotiations with the network.

“If you’re Jim, you sit there and say, ‘OK, how can I get back to negotiate with ESPN?’ If we get to eight CFP teams, now Notre Dame has to make a decision,” the source said. “Notre Dame would have to join a conference, and Notre Dame is obligated per contract to join the ACC through 2036. So if there were a way for the ACC to wave its magic wand and say, ‘Let’s move to eight,’ and if Notre Dame has to join a conference, they have to join the ACC. Now the ACC can go back to ESPN and say, ‘Hey, look what I got. I’ve got Notre Dame football. And so you need to pay me X amount.’ So that’s a way for ACC to get more money.”

The way for all stakeholders to get more money is to expand the CFP. As we enjoy this season’s CFP semifinals — and the Rose Bowl sunset on Saturday — we ponder when these playoffs will grow larger, more luxurious. The safe bet now is 2026.

Evolving the postseason format in college football never has come without turbulence. It just would have been easier to digest without the Texas-sized summertime tease.