It seems like the College Football Playoff (CFP) format could be headed for an historic expansion.
According to Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger, college football coaches have officially endorsed the 24-team CFP format.
“The American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) voted last week to recommend that college leaders implement a playoff with ‘the maximum number of participants,’ discontinue conference championship games, preserve the Army-Navy game’s exclusive time window but hold other games on that day, and end the playoff by the second week of January,” Dellenger reports.
The association is expected to publicly release its endorsements soon.
The AFCA, as an organization, has no power to change the current college format. However, many of the coaches in the association have significant influence over the athletic directors and administrators who wield power within the CFP and the various power conferences.
The debate over whether to move to a 16 or 24-team format has been hotly debated in recent weeks and months. Much of the divide comes down to television rights and the retention of conference championship games. As it stands, ESPN holds the broadcast rights to the 12 CFP games: 10 are broadcast exclusively, and 2 are available under license. ESPN is also the official broadcast partner of the SEC. It has the most lucrative conference championship game in college football, valued at roughly $80 million.
For these reasons, both ESPN and the SEC have worked hard to limit the number of CFP games and keep the conference championship games. Not surprisingly, on the other side of the ledger, the rest of college football wants to expand past 16 games and discard the conference championships to break the SEC-ESPN monopoly on the sport.
The move to a 24-team format gained support in recent weeks, with the Big 12, the ACC, and Notre Dame Athletic Director Pete Bevacqua signaling support for the expansion.
How would a 24-team playoff work?
The most-discussed 24-team model is an all at-large field determined through the CFP rankings, with an automatic spot for the Group of Six leagues. The format adds one playoff round and 12 additional games. The top eight ranked teams would receive a first-round bye while seeds No. 9-24 play in the first round on campus.
Conference championship games would be eliminated and the playoff, presumably, would start immediately after the regular season — a long-discussed shift in the postseason calendar to open a path for the national title game, now played the third week of January, to return to the second Monday in the month.
Hurdles to the idea of expansion remain.
The first, obviously, is money. The deal has to be a money-maker for a much larger playoff field, or no one will make the move regardless of how much they dislike the SEC or ESPN.
Second, scheduling for the Army-Navy game. The game is traditionally played in a standalone window on the second Saturday in December, before the NFL begins playing on Saturdays. While this helps avoid interference from the NFL, an earlier start to the CFP would put the classic rivalry squarely in the first or second week of the 24-team format.
President Trump’s recent executive order to preserve the game’s four-hour window will wreak havoc on playoff scheduling.
Not to mention the fact that if Army and Navy are playing each other during the CFP, there’s no way either could make the 24-team field.
Proposed solutions exist that would address these issues, but none have been decided upon yet. However, with growing support for the 24-team expansion, more effort may be put into finding those solutions.