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The ACC has made its position clear: the College Football Playoff needs to get bigger. Commissioner Jim Phillips said Wednesday what had already been apparent behind the scenes – the league’s coaches and athletic directors want the playoff field doubled. By going public now, the ACC is also setting the tone heading into a series of offseason conference meetings that could reshape college football’s postseason.
The big question hanging over all of this is simple: why expand at all?
The 12-team playoff has only existed for two years. And it wasn’t even the same format both times — the SEC pushed through changes to the seeding structure and rankings criteria in Year 2. After nearly 150 years of college football with no playoff whatsoever, the sport has moved fast. It might be about to move even faster.
The Access Argument
At the center of this debate is access. Phillips made the case bluntly.
“If you’re going to ask presidents and chancellors and boards to continue to invest in their football programs, it’s really important that they have hope, that they have an opportunity at the beginning of the season to get into the playoff,” Phillips said. “I think it can also lead to better nonconference scheduling that you can afford a loss or two, or maybe even three.”
Right now, just 9% of FBS programs qualify for the CFP. For context, the NCAA’s other postseason tournaments — including the FCS playoffs — typically let in around 19% of eligible teams. Expanding to 24 teams would bring the CFP closer to that number, bumping FBS access up to roughly 17.4%.
Phillips also believes the teams slotted between No. 17 and No. 24 in the rankings are legitimate contenders who could actually win a national championship. He’s open to automatic qualifiers (AQs) or a fully at-large system; what he’s not interested in is the uneven AQ structure that appeared in the early 24-team proposals that circulated earlier this offseason.
Ball in the SEC’s Court
The Big 12 is already on board. Commissioner Brett Yormark confirmed that to CBS Sports the day before Phillips’ statement. The Big Ten meets next week, and commissioner Tony Petitti is expected to speak on the record — which is noteworthy, since Petitti has been noticeably quieter than his Power Four peers throughout this process.
If the Big Ten, Big 12, and ACC all publicly align within the next week, the spotlight lands squarely on SEC commissioner Greg Sankey.
Sankey has been holding firm on a 16-team model. He hasn’t budged much, and he hasn’t been shy about pushing back on outside voices entering the conversation. The American Football Coaches Association recently put out a statement calling for playoff models that “maximize the number of participants,” and Sankey responded directly to the Tuscaloosa News.
“Last I knew, the AFCA is not in charge of dealing with the schedule, postseason games or even regular season games. I mean the entity. Or figuring out where they fit in the calendar. I certainly respect their First Amendment rights, but there’s a lot more depth [to this process] than a press release.”
The SEC meets the week after Memorial Day. And here’s the thing that matters most: the SEC and the Big Ten both have to agree on any format change before anything becomes official. Sankey still holds enormous leverage.
What ESPN Wants
There’s another major player in this conversation that doesn’t have a vote but absolutely has influence — ESPN, the CFP’s current broadcast partner.
“ESPN has been pretty clear with all of us that they’d like it to stay at 12, maybe 14, but no higher than 16,” Phillips said.
That’s a significant gap between where the ACC stands and where ESPN wants to land. If the playoff expands to 24 teams, it’s widely expected that a second broadcast partner would enter the picture — potentially landing rights to a semifinal and a rotating national championship game. Think of how the NFL splits its conference championship games between CBS and Fox; something similar could emerge here.
A second bidder could theoretically drive revenue up. That matters, because expansion to 24 teams likely means eliminating conference championship games to make room on the calendar. Even with the season potentially starting on a late-August “Week 0” date, something has to give.
Phillips addressed it directly.
“I have said before, when you look at [conference] championship games, and if you expand the playoff to [24], I think you end up going from regular season right into the playoff.”
Conference title games are lucrative. Cutting them creates a financial hole that additional CFP broadcast revenue would need to fill — and it’s not yet clear whether that math works out. There’s also a broader cultural question: college football’s regular season has carried unique weight for over a century, functioning almost like its own playoff. Whether that changes with more postseason access is something the sport hasn’t fully reckoned with yet.
What Happens Next
For fans who just want a straight answer, Phillips offered something close to one — while also being careful not to overpromise.
“We have to understand what this does. And so you hear coming out of here that we’re for 24 and all the rest of it, but let me also kind of put it in perspective, there’s been no vote on this thing in the CFP. We asked the CFP [and] Rich Clark, as the executive director and the staff, to run [proposals] with our TV consultant and other consultants. We have to run 16- and 24-[team models], and so we don’t have all the information. But I know everybody’s interested in the number, and I’m not interested in skirting it, and we want to talk about it, but we may come back and say boy, that 16 may look better, but as I sit here right now, I stand by what I’ve indicated.”
The ACC’s support for 24 teams is real — but it’s not a done deal. The data isn’t fully in, the SEC hasn’t moved, and ESPN isn’t thrilled. The next few weeks of conference meetings will determine whether this is the offseason college football actually doubled its playoff, or whether the sport settled somewhere in between.
