The future of the College Football Playoff will once again be up for debate this offseason as the sport’s biggest leagues battle it out to determine how many teams should be added to the current 12-team field. The Big Ten has long been a proponent of doubling the field with a heavy reliance on multiple automatic bids per conference, while the SEC favors a more limited 16-team field with 11 at-large bids.

Earlier this month, an internal document detailing the Big Ten’s 24-team proposal was distributed among league power brokers and leaked by ESPN. The document included an image of the full 24-team bracket using 2025’s final rankings with two rounds of on-campus home games.

Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti, who completed a historic 16-0 run to secure the 2025 CFP national championship, recently weighed in on his preferred expansion proposal during Monday’s appearance on the Always College Football podcast with Greg McElroy. And, like the good Big Ten soldier that he is, Cignetti toed the company line and backed his league’s 24-team model.

“I know we’re going to go through a change here at some point and time, there’s a discussion out there about it. It’s a great system, the more teams you can get involved the better, within reason,” Cignetti told McElroy. “… Being that I’m a part of the Big Ten Conference, I have a lot of respect for Tony Petitti, and he supports a 24-team Playoff, (so) I’m going to follow the company line there. But I do think more than 12 would not be a bad thing.”

Curt Cignetti: ‘Just tell me what the format is going to be, and we’ll show up and play’

The CFP management committee, which is made up of 10 FBS conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director, met for three and a half hours in mid-January ahead of the national championship game in Miami to discuss future expansion. And, once again, those meetings ended with no resolution as the sport’s two wealthiest conferences remain at an stalemate, while the other FBS leagues are ready to go to 16 teams, according to On3’s Pete Nakos.

That impasse prompted the CFP to announce the Playoff would remain at 16 teams in 2026, with any future expansion decisions impacting the 2027-28 CFP at the earliest. The deadline to expand the CFP for the 2027 season is Dec. 1. In the meantime, coaches like Cignetti are preferring to focus squarely on what they can control, and that’s just making the Playoff field, however big it ultimately gets to.

“I’m not in charge, so my opinion doesn’t count,” Cignetti added. “You just tell me what the format is going to be, and we’ll show up and play if we make it. My job is to make sure we make it.”