John Kosner Spoke With Stewart Mandel From The New York Times and Eddie Pells From the AP About Media Value for a 24-Team College Football Playoff
Original Article: The Athletic, by Stewart Mandel, May 20th, 2026
Fox Wants a 24-Team College Football Playoff. ESPN’s Pushing Back. No One Knows Who Is Paying
I made my feelings clear last week about the possibility of a 24-team College Football Playoff. The majority of you agree with me that it would be ruinous to the long-term health of college football. Many of you don’t.
But putting opinions aside, there’s a major question mark hovering over this thing that I don’t quite understand:
How can the Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 and Notre Dame come out in support of 24 without yet knowing if someone is going to pay for it?
For all the public shows of support, media consultants for the CFP only recently began modeling TV projections. It’s no mystery why the ACC’s coaches and athletic directors support expansion (more berths for their own schools), but industry sources were surprised that commissioner Jim Phillips went public while also putting this statement out there: “ESPN made it clear that it wants it to stay at 12 or 14, but no more than 16.”
“I haven’t seen (revenue) models yet,” UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond told The Athletic’s Scott Dochterman on Monday at the Big Ten’s spring meetings. “Obviously, if you go to 24, you’re going to lose a championship game, so I think conferences and people have to figure that piece out.”
On Tuesday, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti reiterated there is a “deep commitment to 24 (teams)” within his conference and that “We had zero conversation about 16.” That’s in part because he doesn’t “think (the 16-team Playoff) works economically.”
The conferences still need to figure out how to replace an estimated $200-$250 million in annual combined value of their canceled conference championship games, Petitti claimed the gate receipts from the 12 new on-campus games would at least account for $80 million of the tab, but the SEC’s alone is worth $100 million (which, unlike CFP revenue, it keeps for itself). There’s a reason SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has not yet hopped on board a proposal his Big Ten foil first began circulating last year.
But the Big Ten’s primary rights holder, Fox Sports, strongly favors 24.
“I don’t see any reason why the CFP can’t be 24 teams,” Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks said last fall (and again on subsequent occasions). “(It) would give the CFP the opportunity to have more networks involved.”
It looks pretty simple, right? Fox wants in on the CFP for the first time, and ESPN wants to keep the tournament to itself.
But there’s more to it than that. Less than three years ago, the CFP’s entire rights came on the market — and Fox did not even bid. No one did except ESPN, which paid $1.3 billion annually to re-up through 2031-32.
But now we’re to believe there’s going to be a bidding war for one early-December weekend of games involving teams ranked Nos. 9 through 24?
“You’re essentially just bringing in more teams with less and less chance of competing for the championship,” said media analyst John Kosner. “The media value will grow a bit, but it might not grow to the level schools hope.”
But the networks may be less concerned with the value of the additional games than with the effect Playoff expansion could have on the 14 weeks of programming that precedes it. And on that, too, ESPN and Fox could not see things more differently.
ABC/ESPN has seen a sizeable increase in its regular-season viewership since taking over the SEC’s Game of the Week in 2024. Last season, it aired 10 games prior to the CFP that earned at least 10 million viewers. Another 24 games reached at least 5 million. ESPN execs fear that ratings for those big-ticket games will take a dip if the postseason field doubles overnight.
“If you get to 24 games, are there additional teams in November games where their fan bases now have a reason to be more interested? Yes, that’s mathematically true,” an ESPN source said. “But there’s going to be less interest in what has traditionally been the top end of the sport. The negative impact of those outweighs whatever positive impact you’re going to get from the (lower) games.”
Fox, on the other hand, is trying to solve a different problem: It’s not getting enough high-end games from its deals with the Big Ten and Big 12. It aired three games with at least 10 million viewers last season and only two others that topped 5 million.
That void is particularly acute in September, given that Big Ten schools tend to play few marquee nonconference games. Fox this season will have an Oklahoma-Michigan showdown in Week 2, but its Week 1 “Big Noon Saturday” matchup might be something like Ohio State-Ball State or Michigan-Western Michigan. Week 3? Possibly Penn State-Buffalo.
Big Ten folks argue that schools will be more likely to schedule tough out-of-conference opponents if losses carry less risk. Fox’s Shanks agrees.
“If you don’t get penalized for playing those big nonconference games early, and there’s a bigger pool of teams that can get into a 24-team Playoff, the schedule gets better in September,” he said last month.
But that’s a big assumption. To this point, the larger the Playoff field has gotten, the more schools have watered down their schedules in fear of suffering one too many losses. SEC schools, anticipating that expansion to at least 16 is surely coming, have been canceling Power 4 home-and-homes with abandon since last year, when the league moved to a nine-game league schedule.
“There’s no evidence in the history of the sport that if you tell a coach or a school that a high-level nonconference game means less to your chances of getting into the postseason, that they’re going to keep playing those games,” the ESPN source said. “The only way to fix the nonconference issue is to come up with some way for the ‘who you played, how you played’ to matter.”
One industry analyst suggested there could be another motive at play for Fox. The NFL may opt out of its current TV contracts early in 2029, and the $25 billion Fox Corporation, which currently pays $2.2 billion annually for its NFL rights package, might struggle to keep up in a future bidding war if the NFL keeps courting multi-trillion-dollar streaming giants Google and Amazon. Fox is lobbying the federal government to crack down on the league’s presence on steaming platforms.
Is it possible that Fox is already preparing for the worst-case NFL scenario by trying to get more entrenched in college football? But shouldn’t Fox be conserving its cash for 2029 rather than spending it on first-round CFP games?
Obviously, there are other potential CFP bidders besides Fox and ESPN, though probably not the big streamers, which have no current stake in college football. TNT Sports, for one, already has a share of the CFP through its sublicensing deal with ESPN. Beginning this season, it will air one of the two semifinals and a quarterfinal game in addition to a pair of first-round matchups. As part of its parent company’s pending sale, TNT could soon merge with CBS, another college football rights holder.
Petitti said Tuesday he has no preference on which networks get involved.
“I want to see who’s ever committed to making it work,” he said. “I don’t have any real feel about who’s the best to program it.”
Worth noting, though: These same conferences, along with the rest of Division I, just went through this dance with CBS and TNT regarding NCAA Tournament expansion. The membership first began pushing to expand March Madness to 72 or 76 teams at least five years ago. It took until 2026 for the 76-team field to become official because it took that long to convince the networks that the price of expansion was worth paying. The pot: An extra $131 million over six years in distributions, divided among 365 Division I schools.
You would hope the Power 4 members won’t reinvent the entire sport of college football for couch cushion change.
College football generates far more eyeballs and far more revenue than even the wildly popular March Madness. But if you’re someone like me rooting hard against 24, here’s hoping March Madness history repeats itself.
In 2010, the NCAA seriously considered jumping to 96. ESPN, which was itching to seize the event from CBS, was all in. NCAA execs talked openly about the format at that year’s Final Four. The public, of course, hated the idea, and yet it appeared to be hurtling toward reality.
Then CBS and Turner Sports stopped the lunacy by teaming up to bid on the more modest 68-team version that fans still thoroughly enjoy today.
Perhaps this current drama ends with ESPN and TNT opening their checkbooks just enough to squeeze out Fox and contain CFP expansion to 16.
Which, while still unnecessary, would be less insane than 24.
— The Athletic‘s Scott Dochterman contributed to this report.
Original Article: The AP, by Eddie Pells, May 20th, 2026
As CFP barrels toward 24 teams, the questions remain: Who’s paying for this, and how much?
As momentum builds behind the Big Ten’s idea of doubling the College Football Playoff to 24 teams, one critical question remains: Who wants to televise it?
Fox has indicated it likes the 24-team idea, but embedded within that equation is the critical calculation of how much that network, or any broadcast partner, would pay for a new set of games involving second-tier teams that might not garner the same TV ratings as some of the biggest programs in the sport.
“The answer is ‘less,’ but not nothing,'" said Ed Desser, a former NBA executive and media rights expert who co-authored a paper about the value of college football on TV with former ESPN executive John Kosner. “There will be perceived value. It becomes a question of, on the margin, can you create good, meaningful games that enhance the value of the playoff? Or are you just kind of making people wait longer for the entree, for the game they really want?”
The CFP deal that starts this season with ESPN is worth $7.8 billion over six seasons. That network would have first dibs on the first two games added to any package. The rest are up for grabs.
“I want to see whoever is committed to making it work,” Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said this week when asked which TV partner he'd like to see jump in. “I think it's about whoever has the commitment to scheduling it right and who's going to bring the right resources.”
Figuring the size of the playoff is a puzzle that continues to confound the sport. On one side is the Southeastern Conference, which has held steady to the idea of not expanding past 16 teams though commissioner Greg Sankey teased that some might come around to 24 at meetings next week.
On the other is the Big Ten, which now also has backing from the Atlantic Coast and Big 12 conferences for a move to 24.
The SEC’s idea would more or less keep the overall schedule where it is, including preserving the conference championship games that Petitti estimated to be worth a combined $200 million to the four power conferences.
Sankey has said the league has contracts for its title game and it has to honor those contracts; Petitti didn't seem as tied to the title games, saying he thought the Big Ten could “undo our championship games” as soon as the 2027 season if needed. The conferences are already working on a plan in which the Power 4 would pool their non-playoff teams to feed a new system for a further diluted bowl system, The Athletic reported last week.
A 24-team playoff would eliminate automatic qualifiers and render conference title games virtually meaningless. According to many in the Big Ten, they would give all programs what they crave — more access to the playoff, and a reason for fans and boosters to keep bankrolling all those player salaries.
“I think if we went to 24 teams, there might be 24 teams that could win the national championship,” said Illinois coach Bret Bielema, who is on the board of the American Football Coaches Association that also recently voiced support for the expanded field. “I don’t know if that was true 10 years ago.”
There is still the issue of paying for it.
While popular, college football only captures a fraction of the viewers as the NFL.
The 30.1 million who tuned into last season’s college final between Indiana and Miami would have ranked fifth on the NFL’s list of most-watched regular-season offerings. The Super Bowl drew more than 125 million viewers.
For the weeks when the CFP goes against NFL regular-season games – first-round contests the past two years have taken place opposite NFL games on Saturdays – the NFL games have drawn between 2.5 times and 5 times the viewers. Part of this is because the NFL games are over-the-air on Fox and the college games were on cable, TNT/TBS/TruTv.
There is also the issue of how much networks or streamers will have to spend.
The NFL's recent move into streaming and adding new broadcast windows — for example, Christmas Day and the days before and after Thanksgiving — has led to thoughts that the league will press for sooner renegotiations of its own deals that currently have an opt-out clause in 2029.
While the league controls all its games, college football's rights are spread out among the individual conferences and the CFP.
“We don’t feel that the current Balkanized state of college football lends itself to maximizing (revenue) across the board,” Kosner said. “Nor do I think that just doubling the CFP at this stage is going to be such a revenue motherlode that it's going to make a difference."
Pettiti views filling the gaps from the lost title-game revenue differently. He sees an influx of on-campus games, which generate $6 million or more in ticket sales and other receipts, as part of the equation.
The SEC, once seemingly in the majority in seeking a move to 16 teams, is now in the minority. Sankey said the league will have to do its own research to see how a bigger expansion would impact the college football calendar, the title games and, of course, the financial bottom line.
“I think there's going to be a lot of pressure on the commissioners to help make it happen," Kosner said. "I would kind of be surprised if, within two years, it hasn’t happened. But I’d also be surprised if it winds up being the sort of business boom that they might hope that it would be.”
