Any day now, what has been apparent about the College Football Playoff for weeks, months even, is likely to become official:

The CFP will not expand for next season and will remain a 12-team event for 2026, the first year of the event’s new contract with ESPN.

Nothing has drastically changed around expansion talks since the offseason, when the Big Ten’s proposal for a 16-team field with multiple automatic qualifier (AQ) bids going to each power conference initially seemed to be the leading contender for a future format. But at the SEC’s spring meetings, league coaches expressed their preference for a model with five AQs and 11 at-large berths, and commissioner Greg Sankey has not wavered from that stance since.

The Big Ten countered this summer with an idea for a 24-team playoff, with even more automatic qualifiers that would be determined by conference standings. Even if commissioner Tony Petitti’s counterparts at the other nine Football Bowl Subdivision conferences had absolutely loved the idea — they did not — the chances of implementing a playoff double the size of the current model for 2026 were minuscule.

Whatever faint hope there was to agree on some sort of expansion for next year is about to be officially snuffed out, with a Dec. 1 deadline to declare a format to ESPN looming.

Prepare for another year of expansion talk, and for the Big Ten’s 24-team model to continue to be part of the discussion — despite the fact that the idea is not particularly popular with fans.

Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks, whose network owns the Big Ten’s media rights but has thus far been shut out of the CFP, threw his support behind the model at an industry event in October.

“I don’t see any reason why the CFP can’t be 24 teams,” he said. “You can fit it into the schedule. … That would give the CFP the opportunity to have more networks involved.”

Among most CFP decision makers, the preferred expansion would be to 16 teams with mostly at-large bids. Eventually, that might be where the CFP’s future lands. But for several reasons, people outside of Big Ten country seem open to considering a format — whether it’s the exact one Petitti put together or a variant — that is bigger and less subjective. Just listen to them.

No one really trusts the committee

At the heart of Petitti’s complaints with the current system is the role of the selection committee. Petitti has stressed that his criticism has nothing to do with the competence or integrity of the committee’s members.

He simply believes they are being given an impossible task. He’s not alone.

“A committee is not ideal to choose a postseason,” Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said during SEC spring meetings. “I question whether it is appropriate for college football.”

Still, the concept of automatic qualifiers is anathema to the SEC’s current stance on the playoff format, which can be summed up simply: We want all the bids.

Any spot that is spoken for in advance via automatic qualifier is a spot the SEC believes it could otherwise earn through an at-large selection process.

“I’m not a big fan of automatic qualifiers,” Mississippi State president Mark Keenum said on the SEC Network earlier this month. “I think the best teams ought to play in our nation’s national tournament to determine who our national champion in college football is going to be.”

The SEC put only three teams in the first 12-team CFP last year, and it set off a storm of discontent among its programs. The CFP staff responded by working with a data company to create a new record strength metric for the committee to use and to tweak the way strength of schedule is calculated to put more weight on games against the very best competition.

The SEC is currently on track to place five teams in the field this season, and that still doesn’t seem good enough.

“We have to figure out how to reward SEC teams for playing in the SEC,” Texas A&M coach Mike Elko said last week. “Because if we’re not going to be rewarded for strength of schedule metrics and we’re not going to be rewarded for strength of record, then it’s going to become really, really challenging with us going to nine SEC games to figure out how the best teams are going to get into the playoffs.”

It took Sankey a long time, but he finally got his schools to agree to expand the SEC schedule from eight to nine games, starting next season. The ACC also added a conference game, but it was schedule alignment with the SEC that the Big Ten was most concerned about.

The Big Ten has been playing nine conference games for a while, and those within the league believe that the addition of an extra loss to the records of half their membership has put their teams at a disadvantage with the selection committee going back to the days of the four-team CFP.

There is also a very real question about whether fan perception of the committee, with criticisms that range from bias to cluelessness, is undercutting the perceived integrity of the event. And at some point, does that harm its popularity?

As much as Sankey and the SEC publicly oppose automatic qualifiers, there is no obviously better way to fill the field more objectively based on on-field results, the way pro sports do.

In the Big Ten’s proposed 16-team model, the AQs would have been split unevenly between the Power 4: four each for the SEC and Big Ten and two apiece for the ACC and Big 12. Conferences would fill their AQs via standings and play-in games.

It could be argued the ACC and Big 12 might be better off in the long run guaranteeing themselves two spots in the field — those leagues got a total of three teams into last season’s Playoff — but the brand damage of conceding their conferences are half as good as the Big Ten and SEC is too much to bear.

“If there was a conversation about a format that gave the power conferences the same number of (automatic qualifiers), I’d be all ears,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said in October. “I want to give our schools a chance each and every year to compete at the highest levels.”

Petitti’s 24-team playoff fixes that by giving each power conference four automatic bids, along with two for the Group of 6 (the new-look Pac-12 will be launched next year). That would leave six at-large bids for the committee to sort through.

Right now, the number of teams in the field is not as important to the Big 12 and ACC as building a format they view as fair.

And because ultimately it’ll be the SEC and Big Ten deciding on the format — the new contracts give them that power — Yormark and ACC commissioner Jim Phillips might be persuaded to line up behind 24.

Redefining success and focusing on the season

A case can be made that every athletic director in the country should push for a 24-team playoff because it might save them money on future buyouts.

Petitti raised eyebrows at Big Ten football media days when he suggested that going 8-4 in the Big Ten is an accomplishment worthy of a playoff spot. But LSU might not be on the hook for $53 million to former coach Brian Kelly right now if the Tigers had been a playoff team in each of his first three seasons — which they could have been with a bigger CFP.

“We’ve created an NFL model, but the NFL is 32 teams and 16 (playoff) spots,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said recently. “The NFL is designed (for teams) to be 8-8 or 9-8. That’s the design of the league. So all year long you have a chance for the playoffs. But we got 136 (FBS) teams for 12 spots, and so now we’ve made it all about the playoffs and so people are losing their jobs.”

Swinney and others can lament the trend, but there is no turning back now.

ADs that support a bigger playoff note the early games would be more exciting than the exhibition feel of bowl games. Instead of 9-3 Illinois and 9-3 South Carolina playing in the Citrus Bowl last New Year’s Eve, they would have squared off in Columbia or Champaign, maybe with a chance to face Texas on the line. Instead of Miami and Iowa State in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, in which quarterback Cam Ward sat out the second half, the Hurricanes might have gone to Ames to face the Cyclones in early December.

“Our fans are not interested in going to the Outback Bowl in its current form,” an SEC athletic director told The Athletic. The AD was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the situation.

As Swinney noted, once teams are out of CFP contention, there is a temptation to turn the page on the current season. Who will be the next coach, coordinator or quarterback?

“Now, it’s just all about the playoffs,” Swinney said.

Keeping more teams in playoff contention deeper into the season should keep fans, players and coaches focused on the current season.

Getting to a 24-team playoff would be far more complicated than 16, requiring a full-on elimination of conference championship games, the value of which is also being debated these days.

There are concerns that going that big might finally be the tipping point for the devaluation of the regular season, especially at the very top. Would a program like Ohio State, which hasn’t played a game as an unranked team since 2011, ever be in danger of missing the Playoff?

But the concept is not going away, and it’s no longer merely one commissioner’s outlandish idea.