The College Football Playoff will expand to 24 teams next season.

On Monday, the CFP announced it had reached an agreement with ESPN to double the Playoff bracket.

The CFP did not disclose financial terms for the expanded field. But according to an ESPN report, the CFP and ESPN have signed a five-year, nearly $1.7 billion deal to accommodate the expanded format that will keep ESPN as its continued broadcast partner. The additional media rights value adds to the existing $7.8 billion media rights package between the CFP and ESPN for the 12-team format that runs until 2032. (ESPN will have the ability to sublicense some games, as it did in the 12-team format to TNT Sports.)

The official vote for expansion was technically unanimous among 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua. However, the SEC and Big Ten had the ultimate say in choosing the next format, due to a memorandum of understanding signed in 2024.

“The decision to expand was driven by a desire to increase opportunities for FBS programs, student-athletes and fan bases to participate in the Playoff and have a chance to play for the CFP National Championship, while new scheduling standards incentivize institutions to schedule more compelling non-conference matchups during the regular season,” the CFP said in a statement on Monday.

The field will be made up of five automatic qualifiers—the conference champions of each power conference and the top-ranked Group of 6 conference team. The rest of the field will be made up of 19 at-large bids.

Though some dates, like Selection Sunday, have not been decided, the CFP has ironed out a basic schedule that prevents the expanded CFP from extending into February. In the weeks leading up to the CFP, ESPN will continue to broadcast its weekly rankings show, CFP executive director Rich Clark told reporters.

The 24-team CFP will require the regular season to end after the final weekend in November—next year, that will be after Saturday, Nov. 27. Then, the 24-team bracket will begin the first full week of December (next year, the first round would be played the weekend of Dec. 11).

The first two rounds of the 24-team CFP will be played on campus sites. The first eight seeds will get a bye for the first round, and will host a second-round game. The teams with seeds 9 through 16 will each host a first-round game on their campuses against seeds 17 through 24. Each of these two rounds will be played between Thursday and Saturday of their respective weekend. As part of the ESPN agreement, the network has guaranteed to broadcast at least three games from the first round and second round on ABC.  

The final three rounds will look much the same as they have during the 12-team Playoff. The quarterfinal and semifinal rounds will be hosted by the New Year’s Six bowls, with the national championship game hosted at a neutral site. The first title game of the 24-team era will be held on Monday, Jan. 24, 2028, in New Orleans.

The CFP is technically not requiring conferences to eliminate conference championship games. However, all four power conferences subsequently announced on Monday that this year’s championship games will be their last. 

The CFP has pledged not to schedule any postseason games on the date of the Army-Navy matchup. The game will be moved to the first Saturday in December before the expanded bracket begins, when conference championships would have taken place, West Point and the Naval Academy announced Monday.

“We will make the 24-team Playoff spectacular for the fans, student-athletes, their institutions and all our stakeholders,” Clark said. “That is our commitment.”

How We Got Here

The announcement follows months of negotiations. Since virtually the moment the 12-team playoff began, college sports administrators have courted the idea of an even bigger (and more lucrative) field. 

Over the past year, conference administrators floated multiple formats. Though there were conversations about a 16-team playoff, the idea of a 24-team playoff quickly gained momentum, particularly among the Big Ten. 

In February, the Big Ten began sharing a proposed 24-team playoff format among its peers. This summer, the ACC and Big 12 voiced support for the 24-team playoff. The lone holdout appeared to be the SEC and commissioner Greg Sankey, who was particularly concerned about the impact of an expanded field on the regular season, and the fate of the financially lucrative conference championship games. 

“I sure feel like it’s headed towards 24 [teams],” Alabama AD Greg Byrne told Front Office Sports earlier this fall. “I do think that we have to be very sensitive to making sure the regular season continues to have the value that it does.” 

The formal deadline for whether the CFP will expand to 24 teams for the 2027 season was Dec. 1; if an agreement was not reached by then, the CFP would have remained at 12 teams next season. Last month, the CFP issued a statement announcing it’s officially considering expansion to 24 teams. Amid those talks, Rich Clark told Front Office Sports Tonight’s Matt Iseman that conversations were taking place not just about money and media rights, but also format and scheduling. 

Then, on Friday, the CFP announced that it was in the “final stages of review”—paving the way for Monday’s announcement. 

On the Monday call with reporters, Clark acknowledged that fans had critiqued the prospect of a 24-team playoff, too. “We appreciate our fans,” he said. “We did take into account their sentiment, and that was rolled into this decision. But we decided to move forward with it.”

Evolution of the CFP 

The College Football Playoff debuted in 2014 with four teams. 

The field expanded to 12 teams ahead of the 2024–25 season, as was a six-year, $7.8 billion media rights extension with ESPN for the new format. The network then struck a sublicensing agreement with TNT for several games. For the past two seasons, the CFP has operated with that 12-team format, utilizing the New Year’s Six bowl games as rotating hosts for the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds.

Minor changes to the 12-team bid process have been made each year. 

In 2024, the four highest-ranked conference champions received first-round byes. But in 2025, the seeding protocol changed, and the 12 qualifying teams were ranked from highest to lowest, granting the top four ranked programs overall byes rather than the top four ranked conference champions.

In the previous two years, the five automatic bids were awarded to the top five–ranked conference champions. (Last season’s ACC Champion, Duke, was left out after a 7–5 regular season, replaced by Sun Belt champion James Madison, which was ranked above it.) But 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 overall from the Group of 6 (formerly the Group of 5). Additionally, Notre Dame will be guaranteed a spot if it finishes ranked in the top 12. 

Revenue distribution has also changed, with the SEC and Big Ten receiving more than half of all distributions between them. 

Now, the biggest change yet is on the horizon with a 24-team model. This year’s CFP, which will culminate on Monday, Jan. 25 in Las Vegas, will mark the end of the 12-team era.