ROSEMONT, Ill. — The decision-makers behind whether the College Football Playoff expands or not are “comfortable” with staying at the current 12-team format.
As part of the CCA meetings at the Big Ten’s headquarters in Chicago, the College Football Playoff management committee of the 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua didn’t spend much time on playoff format discussions despite a looming Dec. 1 deadline on next year’s format, according to CFP executive director Rich Clark.
Clark said that the CFP leaders only devoted about 20 minutes of a meeting that lasted more than four hours to the topic many around college athletics are so interested in. There isn’t another large group meeting scheduled before that Dec. 1 deadline — and no eagerness to schedule one at this moment, it seems — which is another example why maintaining the status quo of 12 teams for 2026 has gained steam.
“My sense is the room’s comfortable with (staying at 12) if that’s where we go and that’s probably why they’re not too pressed with rushing to a decision,” Clark said. “If they can find time to have a discussion and make a decision, they want to have that opportunity. So if we end up staying at 12 we are talking about next year, so we have time to implement all the way up through (Dec. 1) and then we’ll know what it is at that point.”
It mirrors what others like SEC commissioner Greg Sankey have said in the months leading up to this in-person meeting that nothing had to change if there wasn’t agreement on a future format.
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Clark acknowledged another truth about the playoff discussion: Much of the dialogue happens in smaller groups away from the entire one.
The Big Ten and SEC contractually have the final say over the future of the playoff format and have worked closely together on trying to come up with solutions. While they currently seem to differ on what that should look like — the Big Ten prefers a format heavy on automatic qualifiers, the SEC has shifted to prefer 5 automatics + 11 at-large — Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey are in frequent communication and run ideas by each other first. They have also looped in the ACC and Big 12 on format discussions, but have largely kept the rest of the FBS conference commissioners out of the inner circle. Typically, the smaller Power Four group discusses various ideas and then it will be presented to the entire group.
While there have been a considerable of stories and discussion around the future format, including big ideas like the Big Ten’s proposed expansion to 24 or 28 teams, Clark says those smaller groups of commissioners haven’t had much time to dig into the specifics. In just the last month-and-a-half, the SEC and ACC both moved to nine conference games, a move that the Big Ten had pushed for in previous format discussions.
“They’ve been dealing with so many other issues beyond football even that they just haven’t had a lot of time to really lean into format,” Clark said. “So they want to find that time…it’s really a matter of them having time to do it, and they just haven’t found that.”
If they can’t find that time before Dec. 1, the 12-team playoff format will continue in 2026.
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