After 14 half months of haggling over info and wondering motivations, a plan to increase the College Football Playoff to twelve teams became in the end authorised Friday, setting the degree for a multibillion-greenback event as quickly because the 2024 season.
What nevertheless desires to be determined is simply how quickly the cutting-edge 4-team model may be converted and applied, but it’ll take place no later than 2026. When it does, primary college football’s championship bracket will triple in size.
“This become a very historical day for college football,” said Mississippi State President Mark Keenum, chairman of the CFP’s Board of Managers that pressed beforehand after a method that began in June 2021 with an bold plan become derailed for months via provincialism and distrust.
In a unanimous vote that was essential to pursue early growth, the eleven university leaders who make up the board approved the authentic 12-group thought. It calls for the six maximum-ranked conference champions and six at-massive picks — as decided by a selection committee — to make the playoff.A 12-team, eleven-recreation postseason gadget to crown a champion could be worth as plenty as $2 billion in media rights to the conferences that play predominant university soccer, beginning in 2026.
“So our plans are to start the 12-team format for certain beginning in the 2026 soccer season,” Keenum said. “However, we’ve requested our (convention) commissioners at the control committee to discover the possibility people starting the 12-crew playoff format earlier than the 2026 seasons, in both 2024 or 2025. We as participants of the board apprehend there’s a few pretty significant problems that should be resolved.”
If the new format can be carried out earlier than the modern 12-yr settlement with ESPN expires, the meetings ought to make a further $450 million over the final two years. The current deal can pay about $470 million consistent with yr.
CFP Executive Director Bill Hancock stated ESPN underneath its settlement would get the first bid on any new playoff stock added in 2024 and ’25.
Beyond 2025, there’s no TV contract for a playoff. The plan is to take the new layout to the open marketplace and possibly involve more than one TV partners in preference to simply ESPN.The convention commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director who comprise the CFP management committee are scheduled to satisfy Thursday in Dallas. Among the logistical hurdles that they need to clean are dates of video games, host sites, available tv home windows and the impact at the everyday-season schedule.
The committee additionally needs to determine how all that new revenue could be shared after which have that permitted by way of the presidents.
Hancock announced in February that increasing for the 2024 and ’25 seasons turned into off the desk and attention might be grew to become to what the playoff could seem like for 2026 and past. Last month, the CFP locked in sites and dates for the championship games to be played after the 2024 and 2025 seasons. In a 12-team playoff, the ones dates would ought to be driven lower back.But the presidents ultimately determine what takes place with the playoff, and they took topics into their own arms to transport expansion ahead.
“It become time for us to make a decision,” Keenum said.
Even after the February assertion, there have been symptoms early enlargement turned into no longer dead. A June meeting of the commissioners in Utah renewed optimism differences could be settled.
“It definitely wouldn’t marvel me once we agree on the layout, if it occurs earlier than the end of the modern-day term,” Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff stated in July.
Kliavkoff became one among three fantastically new Power Five commissioners, along with Kevin Warren (Big Ten) and Jim Phillips (ACC), whose various objections to the 12-group suggestion last yr stalled negotiations.
That 12-crew plan have been labored on for more than years with the aid of a subgroup of the control committee that covered Greg Sankey of the Southeastern Conference. Skepticism rose between the brand new commissioners, who had no longer been part of a process that started in 2019, and the relaxation after it turned into discovered the SEC could be including Texas and Oklahoma to the powerhouse convention by no later than 2025.