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The College Football Playoff will grow to a 24-team field beginning next season, a move that reshapes postseason scheduling and expands opportunities for programs across the FBS. The CFP announced the change after reaching an agreement with ESPN, setting a new timeline that pushes the bracket into December while preserving the New Year’s Six role in later rounds.
Deal with ESPN and media details
The CFP said Monday it has an agreement with ESPN to support a doubled bracket, though officials did not disclose the financial terms. An ESPN report, however, says the networks and the CFP have struck a roughly five-year, nearly $1.7 billion deal to accommodate the new format.
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That amount would be added to the existing six-year, $7.8 billion media-rights package tied to the 12-team structure that runs through 2032. As with the prior agreement, ESPN will retain sublicensing flexibility for some games.
How the 24-team bracket will work
The expanded field will include five automatic qualifiers — the champions of the four power conferences plus the highest-ranked team from the Group of 6 — and 19 at-large selections. That structure establishes a clear route for conference winners while leaving most spots to the selection committee.
Under the plan, the top eight seeds receive byes into the second round and will host those games. Teams seeded 9–16 will host first-round matchups against 17–24, with the first two rounds held on campus sites and played from Thursday through Saturday of their respective weekends. As part of ESPN’s agreement, the network has guaranteed that at least three games from each of the first two rounds will air on ABC.
The later stages mirror the previous format: quarterfinals and semifinals will rotate through the **New Year’s Six** bowls, and the national title game will be played at a neutral site. The first championship under the 24-team system is scheduled for Monday, Jan. 24, 2028, in New Orleans.
Calendar effects and timing
To accommodate the larger bracket without extending the season into February, the CFP will require the regular season to end after the final weekend in November. For next year, for example, that cutoff falls after Saturday, Nov. 27, and the expanded bracket would begin the first full week of December — with the first round played the weekend of Dec. 11.
ESPN will continue to produce the weekly CFP rankings show in the lead-up to Selection Sunday, CFP executive director Rich Clark told reporters.
Conference votes and who decided
The formal vote to expand was recorded as unanimous among the 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua. Still, the **SEC and Big Ten** carried particular weight because of a memorandum of understanding signed in 2024 that gave them a deciding role in the final format selection.
The CFP framed the change as an effort to create more opportunities for teams, student-athletes and fanbases, while new scheduling standards are intended to encourage more compelling nonconference matchups during the regular season.
Although the CFP is not mandating the elimination of conference championship games, all four power conferences announced on Monday that this season’s title games will be their last under current formats.
Army–Navy and calendar protections
The CFP pledged not to place postseason games on the same date as the Army–Navy matchup. West Point and the Naval Academy said the game will move to the first Saturday in December — before the expanded bracket begins and during the window previously occupied by conference championships.
How negotiations unfolded
The decision caps months of bargaining within college sports. Interest in enlarging the playoff surfaced almost immediately after the 12-team field was adopted, and administrators debated multiple formats over the past year.
The Big Ten helped push the 24-team idea forward earlier in the year by circulating a proposal in February. Support followed from the ACC and Big 12 this summer, while the SEC — and commissioner Greg Sankey in particular — raised concerns about preserving the regular season’s value and the future of lucrative conference title games.
“I sure feel like it’s headed towards 24 [teams],” Alabama AD Greg Byrne told Front Office Sports earlier this fall. The CFP set a formal Dec. 1 deadline to decide whether to expand for the 2027 season; had no agreement been reached, the playoff would have remained at 12 teams.
In recent weeks the CFP signaled progress: it said last month it was officially considering a 24-team model and on Friday described the plan as in the “final stages of review,” clearing the way for Monday’s announcement. On the call with reporters, Clark addressed fan skepticism: “We appreciate our fans. We did take into account their sentiment, and that was rolled into this decision. But we decided to move forward with it.”
Brief history of the College Football Playoff
The CFP began in 2014 with a four-team field and expanded to 12 teams for the 2024–25 season under a media-rights extension with ESPN. That 12-team era included sublicensing arrangements with other broadcasters and used the New Year’s Six bowls to host quarterfinals and semifinals.
Seeding and bid procedures evolved in recent seasons. In 2024, the four highest-ranked conference champions earned first-round byes; the following year the protocol shifted to give byes to the top four teams overall. Automatic bids in recent years were typically granted to the top-ranked conference champions — a system that, last season, left ACC champion Duke out of the field in favor of Sun Belt champion James Madison.
Revenue distributions have also been adjusted, with the SEC and Big Ten together receiving more than half of the payouts. With the 24-team model now approved, this season’s CFP — culminating on Monday, Jan. 25 in Las Vegas — will close the chapter on the 12-team era.
Rich Clark: “We will make the 24-team Playoff spectacular for the fans, student-athletes, their institutions and all our stakeholders,”
