It had been the summer of doom and gloom for college football fans. First the transfer portal was going to kill off the sport. Then NIL. And then, most certainly, super-conferences. Rip up your season tickets, Virginia Tech fans. Skip Homecoming, Iowa State fans. Because if your team is not in the Big Ten or SEC by 2024, it might as well close up shop.
But then, lo and behold, on the Friday before the unofficial last weekend of summer, the 11 university presidents who oversee the College Football Playoff went and threw the 99 FBS programs not in or headed to those two conferences a big fat life preserver.
It took a long, winding and frankly bizarre process to get there, but a 12-team College Football Playoff is officially coming, possibly as soon as 2024, but no later than 2026. And the news couldn’t come at a better time for conferences like the Big 12, Pac-12 and ACC — the latter two run by commissioners who inexplicably voted against it last winter.
After the commissioners failed to reach an agreement following eight months of meetings, the exasperated presidents effectively said, “Thanks, we’ll handle it from here.” Multiple sources told The Athletic that a small subset of presidents, led by Mississippi State’s Mark Keenum and West Virginia’s Gordon Gee, had been holding informal discussions for several months.
The model they approved Friday was virtually unchanged from a working group’s initial proposal in June 2021. The six highest-ranked conference champions and six highest-ranked at-large teams will still get invited.
You read that right. SIX conferences are guaranteed access to the Big Dance. not two.
Every current Power 5 league plus at least one Group of 5 conference will remain nationally relevant right up through the last week of the regular season, regardless of how many billions less they might make than the Big Ten or SEC.
“It’s clear that there is a ‘P2,’ and I’ve used that term before and the media is starting to use it, too,” AAC commissioner Mike Aresco said Friday. “I think with that kind of consolidation, everyone is realizing that it is important to have (CFP) access.”
To that end, Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff should be sending his finest bottle of champagne to Keenum, the chairman of the CFP Board. Keenum’s conference could have kept thriving in a four-team Playoff until the end of time. Kliavkoff’s, on the other hand, hasn’t seen one of its teams qualify in six years. Kliavkoff voted against early expansion the first time because he wanted more clarity on how the revenue will be distributed.
Funny how those concerns got alleviated as soon as USC and UCLA left for the Big Ten and took 40 percent of the Pac-12’s projected revenue with them.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips was steadfastly opposed to early expansion last time around, believing his counterparts should be more focused on sorting out NIL and other issues. Interestingly, those concerns all were magically alleviated as soon as the Big Ten signed an $8 billion TV contract that will pay its members two to three times what the ACC’s will.
Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren also voted no last winter, bewilderingly advocating that the Power 5 conferences be granted preemptive automatic berths. Strangely, his stance “softened” shortly after his Power 5 league sent another Power 5 league to the brink of extinction.
About that.
Friday’s news could not come at a better time for the depleted Pac-12, which is currently in the midst of negotiations with ESPN and others for its next TV contract. Whatever the offer, it likely just went up in value knowing the Pac-12 championship game will become an annual play-in game to the CFP. That, plus its cut of CFP revenue is about to skyrocket with the next TV contract. ESPN’s current deal, which began in 2014, pays an average of $470 million a year. A 12-team event, especially if taken to the open market for 2026 and beyond, could fetch $2 billion a year.
Is that enough to dissuade Oregon from turning down a Big Ten invite if one is dangled? Maybe not. Although that school may now need to consider whether it’s better off in a 12-team league with one or two other CFP contenders compared to six to eight others in an 18-team whopper.
Same goes for the Big 12, which announced this week it would enter into discussions with ESPN and Fox over potential early negotiations for its new contract. Oklahoma, the only current Big 12 program to qualify for the CFP so far, is exiting no later than 2025. In this new world, everyone from Oklahoma State and Baylor to Cincinnati and UCF can become an annual CFP contender. Its regular season also becomes more valuable.
And although Cincinnati is moving up from the AAC, its Playoff run last season now goes from as a rarity for Group of 5 teams to an annual occurrence. Imagine being an East Carolina fan or a Wyoming fan … heck, even a Central Michigan fan, the first season this thing goes into effect. The Playoff is no longer a pipe dream for your school.
Note: None of this means that the non-Alabamas, Georgias and Ohio States of the world are going to start winning national championships more frequently. It may be quite the opposite. Now, even in the years those programs go 10-2 (and perhaps even 9-3), they’ll have a shot at the thing.
But unlike when the BCS went from two to four, the Playoff expansion push was never about determining a champion. The four-team model does that perfectly well. It was about conference title games being rendered meaningless if the participants went in ranked anywhere lower than No. 5 in the country. It was about fans frustrated at having to wait four weeks every December to watch Alabama and Clemson blow out that year’s semifinal opponents. It was about once-exalted bowls like the Rose, Sugar and Orange being relegated to glorified exhibitions that the teams’ NFL-bound stars don’t bother playing.
Last year, Pitt quarterback Kenny Pickett and Michigan State running back Kenneth Walker both opted out of a Peach Bowl that capped off both teams’ best seasons in years. In the new model, every year’s Peach Bowl may be at least a CFP quarterfinal.
The process that led to Friday’s epic news dump began way back in January 2019, the morning of the third Alabama-Clemson national championship game in Santa Clara, when Keenum and the board authorized the commissioners to begin exploring potential expansion models. But going from four to eight, much less 12, still seemed highly unlikely prior to 2026. Too many issues, too much resistance, too complicated to blow up the interconnected web of TV and bowl contracts that make up the CFP.
Today, three-plus years later, it’s become a necessity — for the health of college football.
The sport has proven pretty darn resilient over the last century, so two LA schools playing road games in New Jersey probably wasn’t going to kill the thing, either. But there’s something to be said for creating fan interest rather than testing it.
On Friday, 11 university presidents invited nearly 100 fan bases to come on down.
— Nicole Auerbach contributed reporting.
(Photo: Jerome Miron / USA Today)
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