It’s a year of firsts for the expanded College Football Playoff. The first year there will be 12 teams. The first year there will be on-campus games. And the first year TNT will broadcast playoff games.
TNT will broadcast two first-round matchups this season and next, and will add two quarterfinal matchups starting in 2026. That means the first-ever CFP games on TNT will be Clemson at Texas and SMU at Penn State on Saturday, Dec. 21. Both will also be streamed on Max.
Since the four-team CFP’s inception a decade ago, ESPN has maintained exclusive rights to all playoff matchups. The network re-upped this year, inking a $7.8 billion extension. But just a few months later, ESPN announced that it had sublicensed a few select games to Warner Bros. Discovery. Financial terms of the sublicense were not disclosed.
The deal was one of several that WBD and TNT have signed in the college sports space as part of a bid to invest in NCAA properties. TNT, as well as other WBD channels including streaming platform Max, will now have access to a portion of both men’s March Madness and the CFP, as well as Mountain West football games, Big East basketball games, and Big 12 football and basketball games (thanks to a settlement between the NBA and WBD that expanded into a deal between Disney and WBD).
As the landscape continues to get more complicated with NIL (name, image, and likeness), an unrestricted transfer portal, the expanded CFP, and a looming revenue-sharing model, TNT is leaning in. TNT Sports SVP of acquisitions, business development and partnerships Raphael Poplock previously told Front Office Sports: “I think you have to embrace the chaos.”
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