ROSEMONT, Ill. — With a 12-team College Football Playoff format having already been approved for the 2026 season, CFP executive director Bill Hancock said after two days of meetings this week that expansion any earlier would be “icing on the cake.”
“We’re going to have our cake in 2026,” Hancock said Wednesday. “Can we ice it now and start earlier? That’s what we’re working on now.”
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The CFP management committee — the 10 FBS conference commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick — met for nearly seven hours on Tuesday and for roughly two hours on Wednesday at Big Ten headquarters as they went about implementing the future 12-team format that was voted on by the CFP’s board of managers on Sept. 2.
“I think it’s really important to keep in mind, there’s a lot of focus on, ‘Can we go early?'” Swarbrick said Wednesday. “But we’re really developing the detail for the longer time period, however long that turns out to be for this model.”
Here’s a detailed look at what was discussed this week and what comes next.
An updated timeline
The management committee has its next in-person meeting scheduled for Oct. 20, in Dallas. That’s the one most in the room had circled as a meeting of significance, by which point they hoped to have much more information about calendars, venue availability and contractual relationships.
The commissioners are hoping to have at least one videoconference between now and Oct. 20.
“There’s a lot of work to do, so we’ll see,” Swarbrick said. “But, so far, nothing that causes you to say, ‘This is impossible.'”
Hancock said there isn’t really a hard deadline for figuring out if the 2024 and/or 2025 seasons are possible — there were loose deadlines last winter that clearly turned out to be quite flexible — but the group could run out of time from a logistical standpoint.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has lamented the months lost in the process between January’s vote to scuttle early expansion and September’s unanimous vote from the presidents that opened up its possibility once again. He’s said repeatedly he’s not sure there’s enough time to get all that needs to be done finished in time to have an expanded field before the 2026 season.
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What still needs to be worked out
The calendar. It’s a catch-all term for the dates of games, available broadcast windows and bowl contracts. Hancock said all of these details need to be worked out in concert with each other, as does venue availability.
“The dates are the most important item on the table,” Hancock said.
It is possible — if not likely — that some first-round CFP games will be played on weeknights. Hancock said he would “be surprised” if all four games were played on the same Saturday. That could mean games Wednesday-Friday that week in addition to Saturday.
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“You’d like to have each game in its own window,” Hancock said. “As you know, there are just three (TV) windows: 12, 4 and 8.”
Hancock said the commissioners did not discuss any changes to the first-round game locations, which are set to be played on the campus of seeds Nos. 5 through 8. Bowl executives have been pushing for all-neutral site games, but the bowl system has never been less relevant in this process.
The management committee also continues to discuss the general possibility of shifting the entire regular season up a week to Week 0 with conference championship games falling on Thanksgiving weekend so the CFP could begin the second weekend of December, but that is a topic that would only be explored in the future, for the new deal in 2026 and beyond. Hancock said that it would not be something changed during the current CFP term, which runs through the 2025-26 season.
“Week 0 is not a priority now,” Hancock said.
With the regular season expected to start for most of FBS on Labor Day weekend as it does now, the CFP quarterfinals would fall at or around New Year’s. Hancock said, “New Year’s Day will be a college football day, still.”
There are still outstanding questions related to venue availability for new dates for the national championship game; Atlanta is set to host the January 2025 title game, and Miami is set to host the title game in January 2026. Hancock said that Atlanta organizers still have some work to do because of other business in the community before he can guarantee that they can change the date.
Other outstanding issues
The revenue distribution formula for the new CFP contract, which will begin with the 2026 regular season, has also not been decided. The Big Ten and SEC are expected to push for a formula similar to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, in which leagues receive payouts proportional to the number of teams they put on the field and how far they advance. Swarbrick said it “seems a little unlikely” that the model would stay the same way it’s been — where all of the Power 5 leagues receive the same amount per year regardless of making the CFP or winning the title — in the future, but that the topic is hard to assess at this point.
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It is also not yet clear if the current revenue distribution model will change in an expanded CFP prior to 2026; Hancock said any changes to anything in the current contract require unanimous approval.
The commissioners are also working to find a way to increase benefits to athletes participating in the Playoff, Hancock said. He noted specifically that they are not discussing sharing revenue with athletes but rather various benefits and support. He declined to give an example of what that could look like, but it’s reasonable to think it could mean increased resources for athletes’ families to travel to games and/or stipends.
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(Photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today)