The Granddaddy of Them All is falling in line.
The Rose Bowl, after months of delay, has agreed to amend its contract to pave the way for an expansion of the College Football Playoff in two years, sources tell Sports Illustrated. The CFP is expected to soon announce that the Playoff will expand from four to 12 teams starting with the 2024 season.
While there are still logistical hurdles to cross, the bowl game’s delay represented the biggest obstacle in early expansion. In multiple proposals to CFP officials, the Rose Bowl, the oldest active operating bowl, requested guarantees to keep its traditional date and time in future iterations of the Playoff, something the CFP executive board denied. Few, if any, guarantees can be made for the Playoff beyond 2025 because no contract exists.
Several weeks ago, the CFP gave the Rose Bowl an end-of-the-month deadline to decide its own fate, SI reported Monday. In many ways, the Rose Bowl was holding the CFP hostage, at risk of its own stake in future Playoffs.
The Rose was in position to single-handedly delay Playoff expansion. CFP officials needed unanimous agreement from the six CFP bowls to expand the Playoff to 12 teams before the contract with ESPN ends after the 2025 Playoff. Five of the six bowls—Sugar, Orange, Fiesta, Peach and Cotton—were in support of amending the contract to expand early.
The Rose could have cost college football the $450 million in additional revenue of an expanded playoff in 2024 and ’25, as well as 16 extra Playoff spots. A decision to further delay may have torpedoed its legacy and disrupted any goodwill with high-ranking Playoff decision-makers.
The decision launches the sport into a historic moment. For the first time in the history of major college football, an extensive Playoff will decide the champion.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
More than two months ago, CFP executives unanimously approved a 12-team expanded Playoff to begin no later than 2026, the first year of what would be a new CFP contract with the six bowls and a broadcasting partner or partners. The format is as follows: (1) the six highest-ranked champs get automatic berths; (2) the next six highest-ranked teams get at-large spots; (3) byes go to the top four conference champs; and (4) first-round games are played at the better seed’s home stadium, and quarterfinals and semifinals are played in a rotation of the six bowls.
The 10 FBS commissioners, as well as Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, have spent the last several weeks focusing not on 2026 and beyond, but on expanding in ’24 or ’25. With each meeting, commissioners have resolved a plethora of issues, most notably the scheduling of eight additional Playoff games, the revenue distribution model and the logistics of hosting the first round on campus sites.
Commissioners have established tentative dates for the expanded CFP’s four rounds, but nothing is concrete.
- The first round will be played the third week of December, likely kicking off on Friday and Saturday.
- The CFP quarterfinals are scheduled around New Year’s Day, with three quarterfinals likely on New Year’s Day and one quarterfinal on either New Year’s Eve or Jan. 2.
- The semifinals are scheduled for about a week later, depending on the year. In 2024, that’d be the weekend of Jan. 10–12. Because of NFL playoff games that weekend, Thursday and Friday might be the best options.
- The championship game is expected to be pushed a week or two from its original schedule and remain on a Monday.
Future iterations of the Playoff, starting in 2026, will likely have a different look—not in format but in schedule. There are serious discussions about the entire regular-season calendar moving up a week, turning Week 0 into Week 1 and sliding conference championship weekend from December to Thanksgiving weekend. That would move rivalry weekend up a week, too. It provides more flexibility for such a tight December window while assuring that the sport doesn’t get too deep into January.
The Rose’s decision ends an 18-month process filled with pettiness, frustrations and animosity among an FBS commissioners group that could not agree on a format. The issues were bad enough that their bosses, the FBS presidents, took control of expansion and approved a plan on Sept. 2 to take effect, at latest, by 2026. They encouraged commissioners to explore expanding by ’24.
The impacts of an expanded Playoff are far and wide. Maybe more importantly, expansion in those two years provides a combined 16 new opportunities in a sport that has struggled to establish parity. The Playoff era has been marked by a parade of the same teams from the same leagues advancing to the postseason.
For instance, over the eight-year CFP era, six teams have accounted for 25 of the 32 playoff spots (78%). Last year, three of the five power conferences were not represented in the Playoff—the second time that’s happened in the CFP’s eight years. The Pac-12 and Big 12 have combined to qualify six teams for the eight Playoffs—the same amount as the Big Ten. The SEC has qualified 10 and the ACC eight.
Expanding doesn’t solve a decades-long parity issue in the sport, but it is expected to at least create more critically important late-season matchups for more programs. Even in late November, as many as 30 teams could still be alive to make the field. Take this year. There are no more than six teams with realistic chances to advance to the Playoff heading into the final weekend. In a 12-team edition, that number would swell to more than 20.
“If there were more teams in the mix, it would be a good thing overall for college football,” Bob Bowlsby, the former Big 12 commissioner who helped create the 12-team model, said in January. “We don’t need the same teams in it all the time. It diminishes interest in the event on a national basis.”
College football’s postseason will now more closely mirror other NCAA sports. A four-team Playoff incorporates only about 3% of college football teams. Most NCAA postseason fields include at least 10% of a sport’s total teams, such as in basketball, baseball and softball.
The Rose Bowl, historically protected by longtime relationships with the Pac-12 and Big Ten, nearly destroyed any hopes of early expansion. In delaying its decision, the Rose sent at least two different proposals outlining its wishes to the CFP board of managers, an 11-member group of FBS presidents governing the Playoff. While working around deadlines set by CFP officials, the Rose at first requested to retain its exclusive Jan. 1 window in future Playoffs, something that CFP executives balked at. In the expanded Playoff format approved by presidents on Sept. 2, the six bowls would host the quarterfinals and semifinals in a rotation. When its Playoff game does not fall on New Year’s Day, the Rose wanted to hold a non-CFP game, pitting teams from the Pac-12 and Big Ten, in an exclusive window at its traditional date and time.
In its latest proposal, the Rose Bowl said it would relinquish the exclusive window in exchange for hosting a semifinal on New Year’s Day in two of its three-year rotation—a demand that CFP presidents also shot down.
Months, if not years, of frustration over the Rose Bowl’s positioning came to a head this week, with one high-ranking CFP executive even suggesting removing the bowl from six-bowl rotation starting in 2026 if it did not agree to early expansion.
“Just human nature, there’s going to be a real discussion that’s got to be had about the future of the Rose Bowl if they weren’t willing to work with us,” says the CFP source. “And it does not have to be unanimous.”
