College Football Playoff expansion timeline: Decision on 2024 expected within week

The College Football Playoff will expand from a four-team field to a 12-team bracket by 2026, at latest. But those who run it are trying to expand earlier so that the 12-team tournament could be in place in time for the 2024 regular season. That process has been more complicated than it may seem.

It’s crunch time for the commissioners and presidents who oversee the CFP. To make early expansion a reality, they have to resolve all the major and minor issues in short order — sources told The Athletic a decision needs to be made by the second half of this week. The presidents and chancellors who make up the CFP Board of Managers met Monday morning to be briefed on the Rose Bowl’s latest proposal concerning its role in the 12-team format, and their conversations are continuing, sources familiar with the talks told The Athletic. CFP officials hope to have a final decision on early expansion by Wednesday, because there is only so long they can hold hotel blocks and venues with uncertainty.

They have figured out how the calendar will work for the 2024 and 2025 seasons, when the games will be played and how to make the complicated logistics of on-campus games work. They have also settled how to distribute revenue fairly among Power 5 schools for those two seasons. But there are a few final boxes to check.

In early September, the Board of Managers approved the 12-team model initially proposed by a four-person subcommittee in June 2021. That subcommittee included SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, then-Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, then-Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. The model includes spots for the six highest-ranked FBS conference champions and the six highest-ranked at-large selections. The top four seeds receive a first-round bye, and seeds 5-8 will host home games in the first round. The quarterfinals, semifinals and the national championship will be played at bowl sites.

When the board unanimously approved the 12-team bracket in September, it did so after commissioners spent nearly eight months meeting to work through early expansion issues and failing to do so. They officially tabled the idea in February after failing to get unanimous support. When the presidents revisited the topic over the summer and found unanimity, they essentially overrode the commissioners to get to the finish line. They also assigned the commissioners to figure out if expansion could happen for the 2024 season.

Here’s what you need to know about where things stand.

Rose Bowl reluctance

The Rose Bowl wants assurances from CFP leadership that its game will continue to be played at 5 p.m. ET on New Year’s Day in an exclusive broadcast window. It wants that valuable time slot even in years in which the Rose Bowl is not a CFP quarterfinal game, which would throw a wrench into the calendar and the way the new postseason would work. That assurance would also represent special treatment that no other bowl receives.

If the CFP doesn’t accommodate the Rose Bowl, the Rose Bowl could refuse to break its current contract, which runs through the 2025-26 season. That would end any hopes of expanding early.

“The Rose Bowl Game continues to be open to the possibility of early expansion of the existing playoff. While we have requested specific contract assurances in our initial discussions with the College Football Playoff, we continue to remain open to these discussions,” game organizers said in a statement to the Associated Press. “We have no intention of being the lone roadblock that would keep expansion from happening before the end of its current cycle.”

“As the only New Year’s Six bowl with an independent contract, we’re working to navigate our existing agreement,” Rose Bowl Management Committee Chair Laura Farber told ESPN earlier this month. “While we’re willing to work through certain areas, we’ve maintained that an exclusive broadcast window on Jan. 1 at 2 p.m. PT is important to the Rose Bowl Game.”

Where has there been progress?

Earlier this month, the CFP’s Board of Managers was able to resolve how revenue tied to a 12-team Playoff would be distributed in the 2024 and 2025 seasons. A source with knowledge of the Board of Managers meeting said the model agreed upon by the Board will make payouts more even per Power 5 school.

As it stands now, each Power 5 league earns roughly the same payout each year, regardless of how many teams it sends to the CFP or how far they advance. That has created some friction, especially for schools in leagues that are expanding in size. The compromise will shift the focus from per-league payouts to per-school payouts. Payouts to the Group of 5 leagues will remain unchanged.

The new agreement would only be in place for the 2024 and 2025 seasons. The CFP will sign an entirely new contract for 2026 and beyond, at which point most anticipate several more issues will return to the table. The expanding SEC and Big Ten are expected to push for a payout formula similar to that of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, in which leagues receive payouts proportional to the number of teams they put in the field.

Commissioners have worked through other issues in recent months, from the calendar to the logistical challenges of on-campus games. They’ve worked with campus leaders to identify the toughest parts of staging on-campus games on short notice, from hotel availability to winter commencement ceremonies to campuses that may be closed for winter break. It will be difficult but doable — and prominent athletic directors are already calling for more games beyond just the first round to be played on campuses.

Commissioners have also sorted out the general calendar issues. Down the road, they may propose moving the entire college football season up a week to begin a full schedule the weekend before Labor Day, a stretch currently colloquially referred to as Week 0. Moving up the season so that conference championship games would be played the weekend after Thanksgiving would alleviate some of the pressure on the back end of the schedule, as postseason games run the risk of stretching further into a second semester and create greater overlap with the NFL. But CFP executive director Bill Hancock has said that some issues are long-term issues for a new CFP contract, which will begin in 2026 — and the Week 0 topic is one of them.

If the CFP expands for 2024 and 2025, it will do so with a season starting in Week 1, which may put first-round Playoff games in conflict with Saturday NFL action in December. Although it’s not an ideal situation, CFP leaders are willing to go up against NFL regular season games to play when they need to. It’s likely that first-round games will be played on two weeks after conference championship games, on both Fridays and Saturdays. Quarterfinals would be played around New Year’s Day, with the semifinals a week later and the national championship after that.

All of those tentative plans would need adjusting if the entire season were to move up a week. CFP leaders have said they believe everything will be on the table again (from revenue sharing to the calendar and perhaps even the location of quarterfinal games) when they begin negotiations for the new contract beginning in 2026.

Required reading

(Photo: Dylan Buell / Getty Images)