Fox wants a 24-team College Football Playoff. ESPN’s pushing back. No one knows who is paying

I made my feelings clear last week about the possibility of a 24-team College Football Playoff. The majority of you agree with me that it would be ruinous to the long-term health of college football. Many of you don’t. But putting opinions aside, there’s a major question mark hovering over this thing that I don’t quite understand: How can the Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 and Notre Dame come out in support of 24 without yet knowing if someone is going to pay for it? For all the public shows of support, media consultants for the CFP only recently began modeling TV projections. It’s no mystery why the ACC’s coaches and athletic directors support expansion (more berths for their own schools), but industry sources were surprised that commissioner Jim Phillips went public while also putting this statement out there: “ESPN made it clear that it wants it to stay at 12 or 14, but no more than 16.” “I haven’t seen (revenue) models yet,” UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond told The Athletic’s Scott Dochterman on Monday at the Big Ten’s spring meetings. “Obviously, if you go to 24, you’re going to lose a championship game, so I think conferences and people have to figure that piece out.” On Tuesday, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti reiterated there is a “deep commitment to 24 (teams)” within his conference and that “We had zero conversation about 16.” That’s in part because he doesn’t “think (the 16-team Playoff) works economically.” The conferences still need to figure out how to replace an estimated $200-$250 million in annual combined value of their canceled conference championship games, Petitti claimed the gate receipts from the 12 new on-campus games would at least account for $80 million of the tab, but the SEC’s alone is worth $100 million (which, unlike CFP revenue, it keeps for itself). There’s a reason SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has not yet hopped on board a proposal his Big Ten foil first began circulating last year. “I don’t see any reason why the CFP can’t be 24 teams,” Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks said last fall (and again on subsequent occasions). “(It) would give the CFP the opportunity to have more networks involved.” It looks pretty simple, right? Fox wants in on the CFP for the first time, and ESPN wants to keep the tournament to itself. But there’s more to it than that. Less than three years ago, the CFP’s entire rights came on the market — and Fox did not even bid. No one did except ESPN, which paid $1.3 billion annually to re-up through 2031-32. But now we’re to believe there’s going to be a bidding war for one early-December weekend of games involving teams ranked Nos. 9 through 24? “You’re essentially just bringing in more teams with less and less chance of competing for the championship,” said media analyst John Kosner. “The media value will grow a bit, but it might not grow to the level schools hope.” But the networks may be less concerned with the value of the additional games than with the effect Playoff expansion could have on the 14 weeks of programming that precedes it. And on that, too, ESPN and Fox could not see things more differently. ABC/ESPN has seen a sizeable increase in its regular-season viewership since taking over the SEC’s Game of the Week in 2024. Last season, it aired 10 games prior to the CFP that earned at least 10 million viewers. Another 24 games reached at least 5 million. ESPN execs fear that ratings for those big-ticket games will take a dip if the postseason field doubles overnight. “If you get to 24 games, are there additional teams in November games where their fan bases now have a reason to be more interested? Yes, that’s mathematically true,” an ESPN source said. “But there’s going to be less interest in what has traditionally been the top end of the sport. The negative impact of those outweighs whatever positive impact you’re going to get from the (lower) games.” Fox, on the other hand, is trying to solve a different problem: It’s not getting enough high-end games from its deals with the Big Ten and Big 12. It aired three games with at least 10 million viewers last season and only two others that topped 5 million. That void is particularly acute in September, given that Big Ten schools tend to play few marquee nonconference games. Fox this season will have an Oklahoma-Michigan showdown in Week 2, but its Week 1 “Big Noon Saturday” matchup might be something like Ohio State-Ball State or Michigan-Western Michigan. Week 3? Possibly Penn State-Buffalo. Big Ten folks argue that schools will be more likely to schedule tough out-of-conference opponents if losses carry less risk. Fox’s Shanks agrees. “If you don’t get penalized for playing those big nonconference games early, and there’s a bigger pool of teams that can get into a 24-team Playoff, the schedule gets better in September,” he said last month. But that’s a big assumption. To this point, the larger the Playoff field has gotten, the more schools have watered down their schedules in fear of suffering one too many losses. SEC schools, anticipating that expansion to at least 16 is surely coming, have been canceling Power 4 home-and-homes with abandon since last year, when the league moved to a nine-game league schedule. “There’s no evidence in the history of the sport that if you tell a coach or a school that a high-level nonconference game means less to your chances of getting into the postseason, that they’re going to keep playing those games,” the ESPN source said. “The only way to fix the nonconference issue is to come up with some way for the ‘who you played, how you played’ to matter.” One industry analyst suggested there could be another motive at play for Fox. The NFL may opt out of its current TV contracts early in 2029, and the $25 billion Fox Corporation, which currently pays $2.2 billion annually for it NFL rights package, might struggle to keep up in a future bidding war if the NFL keeps courting multi-trillion-dollar streaming giants Google and Amazon. Fox is lobbying the federal government to crack down on the league’s presence on steaming platforms. Is it possible that Fox is already preparing for the worst-case NFL scenario by trying to get more entrenched in college football? But shouldn’t Fox be conserving its cash for 2029 rather than spending it on first-round CFP games? Obviously, there are other potential CFP bidders besides Fox and ESPN, though probably not the big streamers, which have no current stake in college football. TNT Sports, for one, already has a share of the CFP through its sublicensing deal with ESPN. Beginning this season, it will air one of the two semifinals and a quarterfinal game in addition to a pair of first-round matchups. As part of its parent company’s pending sale, TNT could soon merge with CBS, another college football rights holder. Petitti said Tuesday he has no preference on which networks get involved. “I want to see who’s ever committed to making it work,” he said. “I don’t have any real feel about who’s the best to program it.” Worth noting, though: These same conferences, along with the rest of Division I, just went through this dance with CBS and TNT regarding NCAA Tournament expansion. The membership first began pushing to expand March Madness to 72 or 76 teams at least five years ago. It took until 2026 for the 76-team field to become official because it took that long to convince the networks that the price of expansion was worth paying. The pot: An extra $131 million a year in distributions, divided among 365 Division I schools. You would hope the Power 4 members won’t reinvent the entire sport of college football for couch cushion change. College football generates far more eyeballs and far more revenue than even the wildly popular March Madness. But if you’re someone like me rooting hard against 24, here’s hoping March Madness history repeats itself. In 2010, the NCAA seriously considered jumping to 96. ESPN, which was itching to seize the event from CBS, was all in. NCAA execs talked openly about the format at that year’s Final Four. The public, of course, hated the idea, and yet it appeared to be hurtling toward reality. Then CBS and Turner Sports stopped the lunacy by teaming up to bid on the more modest 68-team version that fans still thoroughly enjoy today. Perhaps this current drama ends with ESPN and TNT opening their checkbooks just enough to squeeze out Fox and contain CFP expansion to 16. Which, while still unnecessary, would be less insane than 24.