As the College Football Playoff prepares to remain at 12 teams for 2026, the Big Ten has begun circulating an internal document outlining what a 24‑team postseason could look like, according to a report from Pete Thamel of ESPN.
The 24-team model would eliminate conference championship games, add two full weekends of on‑campus playoff action, and reshape the sport’s competitive and financial landscape.
Under the proposal, the field would include the 23 best teams plus one Group of Six representative, with the top eight seeds receiving byes. The format would feature eight first‑round home games and eight more in the second round, addressing a long‑standing criticism that top teams rarely get rewarded with home playoff environments. Quarterfinals and semifinals would remain at bowl sites, with the title game in mid‑January.
It’s important to note that the document is not official or indicative of the preferences of other FBS conferences. For instance, the SEC continues to back a 16-team model.
Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of the Big Ten’s proposed 24-team CFP format:
Pros of a 24‑Team Format
– More access and late‑season relevance: With more postseason spots, teams that stumble early could still play their way in, a nod to the transfer‑portal era where rosters evolve throughout the season.
– Expanded home‑game inventory: Two rounds of campus games would boost fan engagement and generate new revenue streams.
– Reduced injury risk from title games: Eliminating conference championships removes a high‑stakes, high‑risk extra game — a point the Big Ten emphasized.
Cons of a 24‑Team Format
– Loss of conference championship revenue: Power Four title games carry at least $200 million in media value, not counting ticketing and sponsorships.
– Longer postseason grind: A 24‑team bracket creates a 23‑game playoff, raising concerns about player workload and calendar creep.
– No automatic qualifiers: Some leagues may resist a system that removes guaranteed access for conference champions.
Whether the sport ultimately moves toward 24 teams remains uncertain, but the Big Ten’s proposal ensures the debate will only intensify as the next CFP contract cycle approaches.
Big Ten 24-team internal bracket
I still say and wrote, that a 28-team format with four seven-team regionals will be best, but 24 works too. I can’t say that nobody cares about bowl games because 8 million people watched the Texas-Michigan game and about the same number watched the Pop-Tarts Bowl, but we need more MEANINGFUL” college football games in December.
Unfortunately, the spending is gotten so out of control that they almost have to expand. They can’t control themselves and all sports know that the $$ is in the playoffs. The NBA takes 20 teams, MLB went from 4 to 5 to 6 and college basketball, needingmore revenue, wants to go to at least 72 teams if not 76, or eventually 128 (I am not kidding).
The NFL wil eventually get to 18 games and then 20, and eventually, the NFL will play a 30-game schedule–lol–you know they would if they could.
College football has a choice–cut back on endless spending (never gonna happen) or expand. They’re going to expand.
Read more here…
https://johnny228.wordpress.com/2025/12/04/for-college-football-the-28-is-the-answer/
I had a 24-team playoff concept that would keep the conference championship and make them more meaningful. First, the Army-Navy game should move to week 0 and be the first game of the season with a noon kickoff. The week that game is played is after the current conference championship games. The power 4 conferences would each have a 4-team playoffs, with the semifinals being the week that the conference championship games are played. The G6 would continue to play their championships. The 16 schools in the power 4 conference playoffs are automatic qualifiers in playoff, along with the best two G6 conference champions and 6 at large for Notre Dame and others. The 8 schools that win the Power 4 conference semifinal games get the 8 first round byes. As you mentioned basketball in your proposal, there are conference tournaments in basketball before march madness, so a 4-team conference playoff for each of power 4 that would determine byes and even seeding would add even more value to those games. I think the current 6 bowl rotation for the semifinals and quarterfinals should remain, but the next best 8 bowls (Gator, Alamo, Citrus, etc) should be for the 8 second round games. Nashville’s new stadium will make the music city bowl a good option, as well as sofi in L.A., and the Las Vegas bowl. In the days of the BCS and 4 team playoff, there were often 2 to 3 G5 schools in the top 25 at the end of the year, so I don’t feel 2 G5/G6 champs are too much. The 6 at large will be the highest ranked that don’t otherwise qualify and besides Notre Dame would be heavily made up of SEC and Big Ten schools. At least in the current environment. So 9v24, 10v23, 11v22, 12v21 and so on for the first round on campus. The bracket layout would essentially double the current 12-team bracket. That means the #1 seed gets the 16/17 winner and #8 gets the 9/24 winner.
Shawn:
1. Lots of unfairness there as the at large teams could conceivably get an easier path.
2. Nobody wants to add another round of neutral site games and make fans travel to potentially 4 neutral site games far away from home.
If the field expands to 24, every conference champion needs an automatic entry.
Not every—just the power 4 and one G6—-we can’t have what we just had–no MAC, no CUSA, no Sun Belt, automatics–give the highest ranked G6 a shot, but that’s it.
Mr Furgle, why does FBS have to be the only sports league in the world where half of the teams are eliminated before the season starts?
@Bison Jim
My answer is because there are really three tiers of Division I football.
Power 4
G6
FCS
The G6 schools don’t play the tougher teams and schedules and when they do, they often lose and often lose by big margins. In the NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB, there is only one tier, so the records are reflective of success or failure.
Bowling Green’s 11-1 is not the same as Georgia’s 10-2—that’s why they don’t get a shot to win the natty.
The G6 should form its own playoff, ending the bowl game system
Change is good and would be good here.
I know I am in the minority here, but the more the playoff expands, the less the regular season games will matter, which is the core of college football’s popularity. All the teams are moving to schedule the easiest path to get to 10 wins right now, and expansion will push teams to find the easiest path to 8 or 9 wins. The large playoff structures, like college basketball, prove year after year that the “champion” was not the most deserving or best team, only the one that was hottest at the end of the year.
You could not be more wrong. Think about it. Do you watch the NFL–the regular season matters. The regular season will mean more. If two 6-2 teams are playing, the loser is likely out. Under the old and even current saystem, that game doesn’t mean much. if two 7-3 teams are playing, it would mean nothing, but under this, it has meaning. That’s what you’re missing.
SEC and ACC teams have to play 9 conference game and one P4 opponent; that means they’re playing 10 power conference schools. It’s actually going to be harder to get to ten wins.
Alabama will stay play Charleston Southern and Toledo, but they have to play a P4 school plus 9 conference games.
The best team doesn’t always win—-that’s sports. But, we saw the best team Indiana, win this year, and Seattle, the best NFL team, just won the Super Bowl.
A bigger CFP will not cut down regular season enthusiasm at all—look at the ratings? 20 million watched Ohio State and Michigan and we all knew Ohio State was going to win and go to the CFP.
College Football is the #2 sport now—like the NFL, they just have to put games on and people watch. An exoanded CFP allows them to put more games on.
I completely agree with NO Hitter here. This is going to make it so that most of the season doesn’t matter, just like college basketball. The college basketball tournament is great, so hey, I get the appeal there. But the college basketball regular season? It’s like… I’ll watch a few games when the season kicks off, and then a random game or 3 here or there until February or March, but that’s as a big college sports fan. I acknowledge that even though I’m watching this many games… that a lot of them don’t matter unless you’re caring about whether your team will be the regular season conference champs.
I see the counter argument about the NFL, and I’m here to say… it’s a terrible argurment. The first reason it’s a terrible argument only applies to me because… I find the NFL regular season boring. I’ve always preferred college football. So it’s not a good way to convince me personally. But who cares about that?
The real reason it’s a terrible argument is because it’s comparing apples and oranges. The NFL has a strong, central governing body that can control everything from the draft and how trades work, to scheduling, to divisions, to having a strict system for who makes it into the playoffs. The NFL is two 16 team leagues divided into four 4 team divisions each. Standings and tiebreakers are used to determine who gets into the playoffs. It’s the kind of structure that college football never had and, because it’s the athletic departments, the tv networks, and the converences running the show, it never will have that kind of structure. So ideally you need to work with what you have.
And what you have is… very uneven conferences (that are probably too big at this point to be great for determining a champion anymore). You have very uneven scheduling. You have a room full of people of vastly different “expertise” levels who are going to vote on who “passes the eye test” between teams that are going to have fewer and fewer common opponents to compare to. And who are going to base decisions in part based on history, despite us being in a period where players can (and do) swap teams at crazy speed. (Heck, you have refs who aren’t full time employees deciding how close games play out in a system where donors toss around thousands of dollars like it’s nothing… though that’s a totally different tangent to go off on…)
The regular season will matter less. Because winning your division (like in the NFL) isn’t a thing. Winning your conference (like the NCAA used to focus more on) won’t mean a thing. For some conferences it won’t get your in anyway, for other conferences you’ll be getting in with almost half your conference. So who cares if you lost that early season game, as long as your better than the middle of the conference (if you’re in the SEC or Big 10). This isn’t a system where you can see who is a half game back from who, like the NFL… or most other pro sports. There are NO real standings. If winning your conference matters even less than usual, that means winning regular season games matters less. If strength of schedule may matter more one year, but less the next because it’s just a bunch of randos in a room together voting and they can change what matters to them year by year, then those big name non-conference matchups become potential liabilities.
For this to be like the NFL, you’d need someone saying, “no, you can’t just switch conferences because you want to.” You’d need someone saying “you play x number of games from your conference and y number of games from these other conferences.” You’d need to be able to say “here is definitvely who gets into the playoff, and if you’re outside of that you fall short” in order for that game that John describes between a pair of 6-2 teams to matter. And the athletic departments, conferences, and tv people have too much power for anyone to hand it over to a central governing body that can make these adjustments.
Personally, I’d rather see a playoff where… if you didn’t win your conference you should feel lucky to make the cut. If we’re going to focus just on the power-4 (with maybe 1 G6 champ getting in) … which is a complicated issue to me… then the playoffs should maybe be a 6 or 8 team playoff. Then every game DOES matter and if you’re that 1 or those 3 wildcard teams… you’re lucky to get in, you should have won your conference. But I’ll admit that the size and unevenness of the power 4 conferences now kind of screw with that a bit too.
Kudos to the Big Ten–this is better than a 16-team format and I’m glad that the Big Ten stalled that. Keep it at 12 or go big like this. I have been advocating a 28-team format (only four teams get byes), but 24 is more than acceptable.
The one thing I did read is that the B1G would task the committe to make sure there were no rematches in the Opening Round, (aka the Round of 24).
The 16-team format does nothing to improve the CFP. You’re makinmg the best teams play that Opening Round game, which devalues (an overused) the regular season. By having 20, 24, or 28, you have to give byes and that rewards an 12-0 Indiana and an 12-0 Ohio State. i prefer 12 over 16.
The regular season is played to generate money, give fans games to watch, and allow teams to make their case for postseason play. For some reason, CFB wants to punish a 9-3 or even an 8-4 team by exclsuing them from real postseason play.
In a 24-team CFP, 8-4 probably won’t get you in–in fact in this bracket, the only 8-4 team in firld was the Iowa Hawkeyes (I didn’t dig deep).
The B1G, winner of the last CFPs has become the leader here. They didn’t give in to the SEC and in the end, college football will be better off.
Now–please get together with the players and get real rules on eleigibility. College players should play four years! That’s it. Chambliss should be done and onto the NFL, UFL, CFL, or a real job as an accountant or something.
Think about going 8-4–thatt’s a .667 winning percentage. In baseball, if a team wins .667 of its games, they finish 108-54. They’re making the playoffs. In the NBA and NHL, .667 is 55-27; again playoff bound. In NFL, .667 gets you 11.6 wins, almost always a playoff berth
Do they actually want us to watch the regular season at this point? This is starting to feel like college basketball where you can kind of pick it up mid-season since the early games are fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The tournament is fun, no doubt (not sure that football can replicate that since it would require cinderellas to actually cinderella with some regularity, not just the rare exception that proves the rule), but this isn’t the same sport I watched and attended almost religiously for a good chunk of my life.
I wanted a playoff, certainly, but the way they’ve done it has made a mess of things, and simply adding teams doesn’t fix that.
A ton of people still watch the NFL regular season even though almost half the teams make the playoffs. And yes, I’ve heard the counter argument that the NFL enforces more parity, but I doubt that’s the reason. We haven’t seen a drop in interest in the CFB regular season even though the CFP has expanded dramatically.
How about 16 with 10 champs? If you are the 7th best big ten team, you aren’t good at football. Sorry, try again next year.
I am very enthusiastic about Big Ten Football especially regular season however I am not enthusiastic about 24-team CFP document.
Please forgive me Big Ten conference.
Fantastic idea. Finally, a conference with brains putting something together.
Oh, and to the “purists” who want to keep the conference championship game, that game first happened in 1992 when the SEC wanted to get an extra metric to sneak its way into the BCS. The game did not happen before ’92. Also, these games do not mean anything anymore when a team can lose the game and still get into the playoff.
Therefore, this new format is the closest thing to what college football was. We are getting less meaningless game and more meaningful ones.
Finally, perhaps we can add a 12/24 team NIT style tournament.
This way, bowl games actually mean something now. Woohoo!
The winner of Purdue-Maryland should get a bye to the quarterfinals.
Its way too many teams that don’t have a real shot but it would still be fun to watch more quality games. My gripe is to start the whole season earlier. Week 0 should be week 1. Have first round of playoff on Thanksgiving weekend, can have games all day Friday and Saturday. They still want to include the bowl games, that is archaic thinking. Second round first week in December. Quarters third week in December. Semis New Years Day. Final one week later. Move Army Navy game to Veterans Day prime time national tv no matter which day of the week it falls on.
I like the idea of moving the Army/Navy game to Veterans Day….and yes, it should count as a conference game in the American.
I agree with the idea of starting CFB Week 0 and playing the first round CFP games Black Friday weekend (4 on Black Friday and 4 that Saturday). QFs will still be on NYD because TV partners (the Mouse) want to boost viewership for as many CFP games as possible. But the 2nd round could then be spread out on on the first 2 weekends of Dec with 4 on each weekend (when the NFL is prohibited from Friday night and Saturday games).
And bowl games will exist so long as people watch them on TV. And they do.
No, this is out of control. I’m giving up on college football. It is not the sport I loved. These are supposed to be schools. The sports teams were just to give exercise and help the students become complete individuals. What are we teaching here? That we should strive to succeed in an artificial reality? Ultimately, there is nothing of substance behind this sports world we have created. It is just another crypto currency. The emperor has no clothes.
You nailed it. But this is what it is.
At some point, the dam will break and flooding will be everywhere
I love Division III, but I feel like it’s not the same there either.
The NAIA is also out there
I hear a lot of complaining but viewership for CFB keeps staying level or going up, so evidently the vast majority or people who watch CFB could care less.
Under the proposal, the field would include the 23 best teams plus one Group of Six representative,
Is he not merciful? IS HE NOT MERCIFUL?
Expanding the CFP is a good idea. The G5 schools need to be allowed in. Teams do not need byes. Get rid of byes. 32 teams is the best idea.
Byes are for wussies! Make it either a 16 or 32 team playoff with no byes.
Nope. Byes would give the top teams (who are guaranteed to make a 24 or 32 team playoff) something to play for in the regular season.
Richard: Isn’t it even that the #1 seed would play either the #24 or #32 seed in the first round. Afterall, being #1 going into the playoffs is pretty subjective anyway. Think March Madness….it wouldn’t be the same without those 1/16 opening round matchups.
Basketball is simply different with a much more gigantic tournament and is a game where a single match doesn’t put nearly as much stress and risk of injury on the body of players as football. So trying to apply a basketball tournament format to football is just dumb.
nobody ever wanted this or signed up for it. the younger generation will never understand the juice for a 1 v 2 bcs matchup. that was special, this is a money grab by ppl who dont realize its not their sport to ruin its ours. theyre not stewards of the game just cashing in. Stankey, Kevin Warren, Petitti, Yormark are not football guys, the big ten should be run by Barry Alvarez or somebody who actually cares about the game and not “content”
Just like it’s been generations since anyone understood the “juice” of a #1 vs. #2 NFL title game matchup. Yet the NFL has expanded viewership and fandom massively since those days.
The BCS sucked—one year, USC was voted champion and they didn’t play in the BCS Championship Game. Another year, Auburn was undefeated and didn’t get a chance to play for a championship.
You are overrating that juice.
Everybody wants things to stay the same–afraid to change. But sports has to change, just like everyting else in life.
There will be MORE interest in CFB. Now, the matchup between an 8-2 team and a 7-3 one will mean more because there are playoff implications. People watch NFL games that pit two 5-4 and 7-6 teams because something is on the line with those games. They’ll watch the college games, too.
The bowls are another problem. They now feel hollow, played in empty stadiums with the best players opting out. That’s a bad optic and the CFB brass knows it.
In a 24-team plauoff, the first two rounds could be played on-campus and the stadiums will be packed.
I’m with the B1G here.
Why is 16 or even 32 so complicated for these supposedly intelligent football geniuses? I guess they just think making it complicated is better because it is college and about problem solving.
Guess I have to repeat:
Byes would give the top teams (who are guaranteed to make a 24 or 32 team playoff) something to play for in the regular season.
Like they have nothing to play for unless they get a bye. Top 16 no matter what conference. Top 8 get a home game, seems like a lot to play for.
I remember when college football leaders did not want a college football playoff that looked like the rest of the NCAA football. Now they are proposing the same number of teams as FCS, the same home team games and the only exception is Conference Champions included. I suspect if something like this happens there should be a team selected from each conference (maybe without a champsionship game.