College football moves closer to 24-game playoff and the destruction of the best regular season in sports

The first iteration of the College Football Playoff was in 2014, not too long ago, in the grand scheme of things.Four teams, picked by a selection committee, played two rounds to win a title.

For a decade, despite a long list of controversial choices by that committee, it stayed at four teams.Then, the expansion.This page may contain affiliate links to legal sports betting partners.

If you sign up or place a wager, FOX News may be compensated.This content was created by a team that works independently from the FOX newsroom.After a wave of criticism from Florida State's exclusion from the 2023 edition and administrators realizing that there was a massive reservoir of revenue available if the sport added playoff games, the sport moved to 12.

Just a few years later, here we are and most of the major players involved seem set to blow tradition up further and move to a whopping 24 teams.Seriously.SIGN UP FOR THE DAILY OUTKICK NEWSLETTERA view of the college football playoff national championship trophy on the sidelines of a game between the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets and Pittsburgh Panthers in the fourth quarter at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field on Nov.

22, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia.(Brett Davis/Imagn Images)The execs who control the playoff format met this week outside Chicago, with several new reports saying that the 24-team playoff is all but a done deal."We've worked through a lot of the other issues associated with [a 24-team] expansion and those things needed to happen before we started any kind of negotiation [over money]," said executive director Rich Clark, per Yahoo!'s Ross Dellenger.There's a widespread assumption that the money will be there to make an expansion possible, whether that's with the current network, ESPN or another broadcast partner.

And Clark seemed confident enough to publicly explain some details of how the new format would work.Eight first-round games would start two weeks after the end of the regular season, essentially one week af...