Why a 24-Team College Football Playoff is a Disaster in the Making

Just two years ago, college football underwent a seismic shift by expanding the College Football Playoff to 12 teams. Fans were promised that a wider field would preserve the sanctity of the regular season while offering unprecedented access. It felt like a reasonable compromise.

Fast forward to today, and the goalposts haven’t just been moved—they’ve been completely uprooted. As conference commissioners and coaches gather for spring meetings, the Big Ten, ACC, Big 12, and the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) are aggressively pushing a proposal to blow the bracket up to a staggering 24 teams as early as 2027.

Let’s call this exactly what it is: a short-sighted, greed-driven disaster that threatens to permanently break the sport we love.

The Naked Truth: It’s a Shameless Money Grab

The primary driving force behind this 24-team fever dream has nothing to do with competitive fairness, player safety, or crowning a rightful champion. It is an unadulterated cash grab orchestrated by television executives and panic-stricken coaches.

Under the current television landscape, ESPN holds an exclusive grip on the CFP as long as the bracket stays under 14 teams. The moment the field expands to 15 or more, the additional games hit the open market. Competitors like Fox, NBC, and CBS are drooling at the mouth for a piece of the postseason pie, and conference commissioners are more than happy to dilute their own product if it means a fatter television distribution check.

Meanwhile, coaches are backing the maximum expansion model for a simpler, entirely selfish reason: job security.

“Coaches love a 24-team playoff because if you broaden the definition of ‘success’ to include the top two dozen teams, you don’t get fired for finishing 8–4,” notes sports media analysts. “It turns a high-stakes profession into a safety net.”

The Dilution of Excellence: Welcome to the Participation Trophy Era

College football’s greatest asset has always been its exclusivity. In the NFL, an 8–9 team can get hot in January and go on a run. In college football, every single Saturday historically carried the weight of a playoff game. One bad afternoon in October could end your national championship aspirations.

A 24-team format completely obliterates that urgency. If this model had been in place over the last decade, 80 different programs would have made the playoff field at some point.

• The 2025 Reality: Under a 24-team model, a 7–6 Clemson squad or a thoroughly uninspiring 8–4 mid-tier SEC team gets to play for a national title.
• The Regular Season Eraser: Why should a premier matchup between Ohio State and Oregon in October matter if both teams can sleepwalk through two or three regular-season losses and still host a playoff game in December?

As SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey rightly warned, expanding to 24 teams will inevitably lead to powerhouse programs resting their star players during historic rivalry weeks. The Iron Bowl, the Game, and the Red River Rivalry will be reduced to NFL-style Week 18 exhibitions where teams protect their assets rather than playing for history.

The Logistics are a Nightmare

The physical toll on these athletes—who are still ostensibly student-athletes, despite the professionalization of the sport—is becoming entirely untenable.

To accommodate a 24-team bracket, proponents are suggesting the elimination of conference championship games. But replacing a single, hyper-lucrative championship weekend with a grueling, five-round postseason tournament means final-four teams could end up playing 16 or 17 games in a season. That is an NFL-sized workload being imposed on collegiate bodies, all while they are supposed to be navigating finals week in mid-December.

Furthermore, the structural gap between the haves and the have-nots will only widen. While the Power 4 conferences will routinely hoard 22 or 23 of the available bids, the Group of 6 will still be fighting over a single, token automatic qualifying spot. It isn’t “expanded access”; it is an institutionalized monopoly for the mega-conferences.

The Bottom Line

The 12-team playoff was a necessary evolution. It captured the bubble teams, created incredible on-campus energy, and kept the regular season intensely meaningful.

But doubling the field to 24 teams is a bridge too far. It rewards mediocrity, cheapens the regular season, and treats the fans like bottomless piggy banks. If the powers that be proceed down this road, they will find that in their frantic rush to turn college football into the NFL, they will have stripped away the exact magic that made it special in the first place.