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There’s growing momentum for an expanded College Football Playoff. Last month, the CFP issued a statement announcing its officially considering expansion to 24 teams, while launching a 30-day negotiating window with ESPN. However, influential media members question if expansion will stop there.
NBC Sports broadcaster John Fanta and Josh Pate, host of Josh Pate’s College Football Show and contributing analyst at ESPN, slammed the idea of expansion at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit Tuesday morning.
“We’re going to call it an expanded playoff,” Pate said. “Really, what it is is it’s an ATM to bail out very bad decision-making from, and I use this term loosely, leadership in college football.”
The formal deadline for whether the CFP will expand to 24 teams for the 2027 season is on Dec. 1; if an agreement is not reached, then it will remain at 12 teams next season.
Fanta’s seen expansion in another sport he covers: college basketball. The NCAA tournament has expanded from 64 teams to 68 in recent years and will debut a 76-team field this upcoming season. When asked his opinion by Front Office Sports’s Ryan Glasspiegel, he wonders if the CFP will follow a similar trend of continued growth.
“The effort’s going to be there, the pageantry, the theater of it’s going to be there,” Fanta said. “I get all those things, and I love that about college football. I think college football is really fun, but we have barely given 12 teams time and runway. The moment that it goes to 12, we say 24. When it goes to 24, are we going to try to go to 30?”
Pate quickly quipped back, adding to Fanta’s point.
“For all of these reasons that you would expand to 24, I keep looking, and I keep saying, why would you stop at 24?” Pate said. “Why not go to 36? It’s the college basketball effect, but it’s just in college football.”
The College Football Playoff debuted in 2014 with four teams. The field expanded to 12 teams after the 2023 season and has changed in each subsequent season.
In 2024, the four highest-ranked conference champions received first-round byes. In 2025, the seeding protocol changed, and the 12 qualifying teams were ranked from highest to lowest. This year, the Power 4 conferences will each be guaranteed a spot for their conference champion, along with one spot for the highest-ranked team from the Group of 6 (formerly the Group of 5). Last season’s ACC champion, Duke, was left out after a 7-5 regular season.
While comparing the two sports, Fanta acknowledged that expansion in basketball seems more practical than football. The variance in the NCAA tournament over its history lends itself to more upsets and parity. Conversely, the average margin of victory in the first round of College Football Playoff games in the first two years of the 12-team era has been nearly 18 points per game.
“Basketball is different than football. It just is,” Fanta said. “You can come out, and you can go 10 for your first 13 from (three-point range) and be involved in the game. In college football, the game is won and lost in the trenches, and we’re seeing it in a lot of these first-round college football playoff games.
“I don’t think there’s nearly as much of a difference between (the 75th team and the 55th team) in college basketball. There’s a difference in college football, a significant one.”
Despite public criticisms, industry leaders feel a 24-team CFP is inevitable at some point. More than expanded access and parity, Pate believes the idea is being pushed through to increase revenue and viewership.
“The movers in college football are even going so far as to acknowledge publicly, ‘We know that fan support, or sentiment rather, is against this,” Pate said. “It’s almost that ‘Well, you’ll watch anyway’. You know, you’ll take what we give you anyway. But in the aggregate, we’ve really screwed this up nine ways from Sunday. We need a bailout. We’ve got to create revenue somewhere.”
