{"id":654613,"date":"2026-05-20T15:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T15:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/654613\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T15:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T15:16:09","slug":"fox-wants-a-24-team-college-football-playoff-espns-pushing-back-no-one-knows-who-is-paying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/654613\/","title":{"rendered":"Fox wants a 24-team College Football Playoff. ESPN\u2019s pushing back. No one knows who is paying"},"content":{"rendered":"

I made my feelings clear last week about the possibility<\/a> 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\u2019t.<\/p>\n

But putting opinions aside, there\u2019s a major question mark hovering over this thing that I don\u2019t quite understand:<\/p>\n

How can the Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 and Notre Dame come out in support of 24<\/a> without yet knowing if someone is going to pay for it?<\/p>\n

For all the public shows of support, media consultants for the CFP only recently began modeling TV projections. It\u2019s no mystery why the ACC\u2019s 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: \u201cESPN made it clear that it wants it to stay at 12 or 14, but no more than 16.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI haven\u2019t seen (revenue) models yet,\u201d UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond told The Athletic\u2019s Scott Dochterman on Monday at the Big Ten\u2019s spring meetings. \u201cObviously, if you go to 24, you\u2019re going to lose a championship game, so I think conferences and people have to figure that piece out.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti reiterated there is a \u201cdeep commitment to 24 (teams)\u201d within his conference and that \u201cWe had zero conversation about 16.\u201d That\u2019s in part because he doesn\u2019t \u201cthink (the 16-team Playoff) works economically.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s alone is worth $100 million (which, unlike CFP revenue, it keeps for itself). There\u2019s a reason SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has not yet hopped on board a proposal his Big Ten foil first began circulating last year.<\/p>\n

But the Big Ten\u2019s primary rights holder, Fox Sports, strongly favors 24.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t see any reason why the CFP can\u2019t be 24 teams,\u201d Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks said last fall (and again on subsequent occasions). \u201c(It) would give the CFP the opportunity to have more networks involved.\u201d<\/p>\n

It looks pretty simple, right? Fox wants in on the CFP for the first time, and ESPN wants to keep the tournament to itself.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s more to it than that. Less than three years ago, the CFP\u2019s entire rights came on the market \u2014 and Fox did not even bid. No one did except ESPN, which paid $1.3 billion annually to re-up through 2031-32.<\/p>\n

But now we\u2019re to believe there\u2019s going to be a bidding war for one early-December weekend of games involving teams ranked Nos. 9 through 24?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re essentially just bringing in more teams with less and less chance of competing for the championship,\u201d said media analyst John Kosner. \u201cThe media value will grow a bit, but it might not grow to the level schools hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

ABC\/ESPN has seen a sizeable increase in its regular-season viewership since taking over the SEC\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf 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\u2019s mathematically true,\u201d an ESPN source said. \u201cBut there\u2019s 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\u2019re going to get from the (lower) games.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fox, on the other hand, is trying to solve a different problem: It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cBig Noon Saturday\u201d matchup might be something like Ohio State-Ball State or Michigan-Western Michigan. Week 3? Possibly Penn State-Buffalo.<\/p>\n

Big Ten folks argue that schools will be more likely to schedule tough out-of-conference opponents if losses carry less risk. Fox\u2019s Shanks agrees.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t get penalized for playing those big nonconference games early, and there\u2019s a bigger pool of teams that can get into a 24-team Playoff, the schedule gets better in September,\u201d he said last month.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s 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\u2019re going to keep playing those games,\u201d the ESPN source said. \u201cThe only way to fix the nonconference issue is to come up with some way for the \u2018who you played, how you played\u2019 to matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s presence on steaming platforms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t Fox be conserving its cash for 2029 rather than spending it on first-round CFP games?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s pending sale, TNT could soon merge with CBS, another college football rights holder.<\/p>\n

Petitti said Tuesday he has no preference on which networks get involved.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to see who\u2019s ever committed to making it work,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t have any real feel about who\u2019s the best to program it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

You would hope the Power 4 members won\u2019t reinvent the entire sport of college football for couch cushion change.<\/p>\n

College football generates far more eyeballs and far more revenue than even the wildly popular March Madness. But if you\u2019re someone like me rooting hard against 24, here\u2019s hoping March Madness history repeats itself.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Final Four. The public, of course, hated the idea, and yet it appeared to be hurtling toward reality.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Which, while still unnecessary, would be less insane than 24.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Scott Dochterman contributed to this report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I made my feelings clear last week about the possibility of a 24-team College Football Playoff. The majority…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":654614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[1607,399,398,396,397,99,1794],"class_list":["post-654613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-college-football","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports","tag-sports-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=654613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/654614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=654613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=654613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=654613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}