What started last summer with the enthusiastic unveiling of a plan for a 12-team College Football Playoff has come to a halt with the cold, hard reality that expansion will not happen until at least 2026 — if at all.
The CFP is set to remain a four-team format through the 2025 season after the administrators who manage the postseason failed to agree on a plan to expand before the current contracts run out.
“I’m disappointed we couldn’t get something in place,” American Athletic Conference Commissioner Mike Aresco told The Associated Press on Friday. “Time was running out. The disappointment also stems from the fact that I think we will eventually get there and I think 12-team is still the most likely scenario.”
The CFP management committee, comprised of 10 conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director, met by video conference earlier this week.
Aresco, who released a letter Monday detailing the obstacles to expansion, said the purpose of the call was to determine if anyone’s position had changed.
“Positions hadn’t changed. So at that point, I guess the implications were clear,” he said.
Unable to break an impasse, the commissioners decided to abandon efforts to implement a 12-team format for the 2024 season and recommended staying with the current model to the presidents who oversee the playoff.
The Board of Managers accepted the recommendation Thursday and directed the commissioners to continue discussions on a new format to go into effect for the 2026 season.
“I don’t think it becomes any easier,” Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey said. “In fact, I think it becomes more complicated.”
As Aresco said: “After 2025 there is no playoff.”
The decision to shelve early expansion comes as no surprise. The commissioners left their last in-person meetings in early January gridlocked and unable to produce the unanimous consensus needed to move forward with a 12-team proposal they had been haggling over since June.
The presidents did not fully close the door on early expansion after that meeting, but hope for an agreement was clearly fading.
A few days after the meetings in Indianapolis, Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner Jim Phillips took the strongest public stance yet against early expansion, saying a new CFP format should not be a priority with so much uncertainty throughout college sports.
On Friday, the commissioners finally signaled they have given up on on trying to implement expansion for the final two years of the CFP’s 12-year deal with ESPN — a failure that will cost the conferences an estimated $450 million in additional revenue.
Now they will focus their attention on building a new model for beyond the 2026 season when there are no agreements in place.
