ESPN’s Pete Thamel: CFP 24-Team Expansion is More about Access Than Money

The 24-team College Football Playoff is not a rumor anymore. According to ESPN's Pete Thamel, it is an inevitability, and it is coming fast.

"It is coming," Thamel told Rich from Provo, where he was gearing up for game day. "Nothing is easy in college sports." There has been an agreed-upon move to the format, he explained, and what remains is hashing out scheduling, long-form contracts and the rest of the paperwork. The CFP walked its stakeholders through what was coming in a meeting the day before. Until signatures are on the contract, nothing will be formally announced, and that could take a week or so.

The surprising part is the timeline. This is for 2027. College football fans are only just getting used to a 12-team format, and the sport is in the first year of a six-year TV deal. For the next five years of that deal, the bracket is set to double.

**Access, not just money**

Rich opened with the obvious. He knows the answer to "why" is money. His real question was, who actually wants this?

Thamel walked through the timeline, and he was careful to frame it as an explanation, not a defense. Last August, he broke the story that the Big Ten had been "socializing" a 24- and 28-team playoff model with its members. "I remember hitting send on that story and it was mocked, Rich," he said. The idea was greeted chilly across the industry. Fourteen or fifteen months later, it is reality.

By February, the ACC and the Big 12 had come out in favor. And while money sits at the root of it, Thamel does not believe campuses and conferences are chasing more money so much as more access. The Big Ten has 18 football teams. It was also the main driver of the 76-team basketball tournament expansion, because it wanted a place for its eighth, ninth and tenth teams.

Tony Petitti, who initiated the conversation and comes from an NFL background, has been overt about wanting meaningful November games, the way two good but not great NFL teams play a late-season game with wild card stakes. Thamel's example was a metaphorical Iowa versus Wisconsin.

**What happens to the regular season**

That is where Rich laughed. How does a bigger bracket make November more meaningful when it neuters much of the regular season? If Michigan and Ohio State both have two losses heading into their late-November game, both are probably in the field anyway. Why would either team put anyone banged up on the field, or pull out all the stops, with a playoff game two or three weeks away?

Thamel called it a very valid question. He has stood on the sideline for the Kick Six. He was there for a one-versus-two Ohio State game when it was Lloyd Carr on the other side. Those are defining memories of his career. But the sport has poured an extra billion or so into the player economy, and schools spending a median of around $30 million want hope.

The last holdout was Greg Sankey, who Thamel described as a crafty executive who never shows his cards until he has to. Sankey never said he was against expansion. He said he needed to see the economics, the committee structure and the impact on the regular season, which Thamel called the best regular season in sports. At his basketball media days this week, Sankey mentioned an openness to the format twice, the most open he has been.

The nine-game SEC schedule pushed things along. Everybody is getting an extra loss, and coaches are panicked about their jobs. But Thamel was clear that coaches do not drive the macro decisions. "They'd take a 100-team playoff," he said. The athletic directors did the pushing. A middle-of-the-road SEC program paying $25 million or $35 million a year wants something to justify the expense, and its odds of reaching a 12-team field are not great. Twenty-four brings in a whole new layer of hope.

Rich did not need convincing on the cost. Asked whether a great top-ten game like Ohio State and Indiana still matters as much, he answered his own question. "No, it doesn't," Rich said. "Let's be honest, it doesn't."

**How the bracket works, and the end of conference title games**

The mechanics, per Thamel: eight byes, then the 24-team field plays down from there, nine versus 24 and so on. The first two weeks are campus games, which Thamel said everybody can agree on. Right now, a team that earns a bye does not get a home playoff game. The new format brings more of them.

Thamel has been to these home playoff games for GameDay, and he called them electric. Notre Dame and Indiana. Oklahoma hosting Alabama, which he said he had never seen like that in a dozen trips to Oklahoma. Texas A&M rocking at an 11 a.m. kick against Miami, as loud a stadium as he has ever heard. The sport is evolving without fully divesting from the bowl system.

Rich asked whether conference championship games are history. "Yes, they are gone," Thamel said. "Those had really lost their juice."

He went further. They were beginning to hurt the teams playing in them. His example was Carson Beck getting hurt for Georgia in the SEC title game and Gunner Stockton making what Thamel believed was his first career start against Notre Dame. He was not saying Georgia wins with Beck, only that Georgia would have had a better chance.

The regular season would end around Thanksgiving weekend, followed by an off weekend for the Heisman, with the playoff starting the second weekend of December. Week zero becomes week one, everything moves earlier, and the calendar has already crept toward a late-January title game. For the casual fan who watches his team every Saturday and ignores the machinations, Thamel said, it will be jarring. "This is a significant moment in the history of college football."

**It won't fix what's broken**

Rich is not against change. But he wanted to know whether this fixes the things that rankle him: free agency every year for players, a tech bro or "a chicken energy magnate" writing checks that stock one roster and not another, coaches treating a dream job as a stepping stone, and scheduling disparities.

"You really caught a range of things there from Congress to chicken energy magnates," Thamel said, laughing.

On Congress, he has been heavily skeptical the whole time. "What are two more inert rule-making bodies than college athletics and Congress?" He did not expect the college sports bill to get through the Senate. The House appears to be a long shot, and much will be determined after the election. Meanwhile, Charlie Baker and the NCAA are suing the governor of Ohio over a transfer executive order. Thamel credited colleague Dan Wetzel with the observation that explaining all of this to a Premier League fan in London would be impossible.

Rich suggested the CFP could become a de facto Super League, a bucket of teams with new rules. Thamel shot that down. The CFP is essentially a TV contract with no power to make transformative rules. Under the memorandum of understanding, Petitti and Sankey drive the decisions.

Thamel has made peace with it. College sports are "wonderful but broken," and always will be. He shared a line from Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter, who told him in a hallway at last year's SEC basketball tournament that it feels like the sport has been three years away from stability for the last five years. The House settlement did not settle anything, Thamel said, and still has about eight years left on it. Unlike the NFL, nobody is in the room saying, "Let's be peers."

Rich had the comedy analogy ready: Brian Regan's New Year's resolution to lose 15 pounds, with 25 pounds to go.

**Who wants this? Utah and BYU**

Rich circled back to Petitti, a former boss of his at CBS Sports who called him first after he left ESPN and gave him the US Open. Rich called him brilliant. But the idea that this makes November more relevant? "That's laughable," Rich said. He questioned whether swapping James Madison for the fifth, sixth or seventh team in the Big Ten or SEC makes the opening round any more competitive, pointing to Tennessee getting whacked by Ohio State.

Thamel answered with what he saw on the ground in Utah. When the story broke, someone at the Utah football facility pulled up a graphic showing the Utes would be hosting LSU under this year's projections. At BYU practice, Kalani Sitake told him it was great news. Morgan Scalley simply said, "Yes."

"When people say, 'Who wants this?' That's who wants this," Thamel said. Programs spending big money with competitive teams want a shot at the postseason. He feels like the defender of an unpopular idea, he admitted, but the response he found was overwhelmingly positive.