‘Handshake agreement’ in place for ESPN to broadcast 24-team playoff in 2027
ATHENS — ESPN announced a “handshake agreement” is in place for the network to air the College Football Playoff’s expansion from 12 to 24 teams.
Per the report, there’s still paperwork to finish up and final board approval needed, but the agreement is “a major step closer” to being finalized for next year.
Georgia coach Kirby Smart has been a proponent for an expanded playoff.
“I think 24 teams is good for the fanbases,” Smart told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in February. “I think when coaches and ADs look at it, we’re looking at our fanbases having an expectation that they want to be in the playoffs — it’s playoffs or bust.”
The 24-team field keeps fans engaged deeper into the season and has the support of coaches feeling job security pressure to make the playoffs.
Smart has said nonplayoff bowls have little interest these days, and that expansion provides financial benefits to schools paying out millions in this NIL era while still trying to utilize football revenue to support other nonrevenue college sports.
“Somewhere in there, you are giving out free inventory that maybe hasn’t been earned, maybe watering down the playoffs with more competitive games if you’re at 24 teams (in the playoffs),” Smart said. “But that’s the cost of doing business.”
Many have argued an expanded playoff will take value from college football’s regular season, but an expanded field could also make teams more likely to schedule more aggressively having a wider margin for error.
A recent trend has seen teams canceling marquee home-and-home, nonconference games in the interest of protecting their records and increasing their likelihood for inclusion in the postseason playoff field.
A new 24-team playoff will also likely mean the abolishment of the SEC championship game, which has been hosted by Atlanta since 1994, one year after its origin in Birmingham, Alabama.
Georgia has appeared in eight of the past nine SEC championship games and enters its 3:30 p.m. home game on Saturday with Auburn as the league’s only unbeaten team, in the driver’s seat to play in what’s expected to be the last league title game before expansion.
The elimination of the league title games would be necessary to create an extra weekend for an expanded CFP field to take place.
The regular season will also start one week earlier to prevent the College Football Playoff from running too deep into the new year.
Though final details for the 24-team CFP field format have yet to be announced, the most prominent discussions feature the Power 4 conference champions — as determined by each league — getting automatic bids along with the highest Group of 6 team and then 19 at-large bids determined by CFP rankings.
The New Year’s Six bowls — Peach, Orange, Cotton, Rose, Fiesta and Sugar — will continue to host quarterfinal and semifinal games after first-round games are hosted by schools, and the championship game will remain in January.
ESPN reported the average additional payment they are paying for the expanded playoff is $345 million a year over the next five years — in addition to the average $1.3 billion annually the entertainment and sports programming network is already paying.
Of the $345 million, ESPN “will essentially be paying only $205 million, as the network is getting back $140 million annually from the cancellation of the three conference championship games ESPN owns the rights to broadcasting.”
ESPN reported that on Sept. 9, they had started a 30-day negotiation window with the CFP to determine the value of a 24-team field. The discussions continued after that window closed Oct. 9.
ESPN would have the option of selling off broadcasting rights to some of the first-round playoff games to other networks — which would offset part of the costs it’s paying associated with an expanded playoff — in the same fashion commonplace with the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, which are expanding from 68 teams to 76 teams this season.