By Chris Marler
It is becoming more likely that the College Football Playoff will expand to 14 or even 16 teams starting in 2026, Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger first reported late Sunday evening.
“Within the SEC and Big Ten, momentum is building to further expand the playoff to 14 or 16 teams, assign multiple automatic qualifiers per league — as many as four each for themselves — and finalize a scheduling arrangement together that may fetch millions in additional revenue from TV partners, sources told Yahoo Sports,” according to the report.
“The playoff format change would clear the way for SEC administrators to, finally, make the long-discussed move to play nine regular-season conference games and would trigger, perhaps, all four power leagues to overhaul their conference championship weekend.”
It appears that the SEC and the Big Ten will have sole decision making rights to the future playoff formats beginning in 2026. That is congruent with the start of ESPN’s new six year television deal with ESPN.
Executives from all ten conferences across the country and Notre Dame agreed to hand control over to the two power conferences. One thing that would come from the agreement would be multiple automatic qualifiers for both the SEC and the Big Ten. What could also come from that agreement would be the SEC finally moving to a nine game conference schedule to appease other conferences currently playing nine games.
“Officials describe the 14-team format as a 4-4-2-2-1+1 model in which the top two seeds receive first-round byes. There would be no byes in a 16-team structure. In either, the CFP selection committee’s role is greatly diminished. The committee, its future — as the memorandum stipulates — also controlled by the SEC and Big Ten, would presumably seed 1 through 14 or 16 based directly on its top-25 rankings,” noted Dellenger.
