The College Football Playoff’s (CFP) Board of Managers will hold a virtual meeting Friday where a vote to expand the playoffs from the current 4-team format may occur.
“There’s momentum,” an unnamed source with knowledge of the meeting told ESPN. “There’s definitely momentum.” The source said there is a 50-50 chance a vote would occur.
The 11-member board meeting Friday includes university presidents representing each of the 10 Division I football conferences, plus Notre Dame president John Jenkins.
The potential vote must be unanimous to allow for expansion of the CFP field by as early as 2024, according to Sports Illustrated, which was the first to report the meeting. CFP Executive Director Bill Hancock has declined to confirm or deny the report.
The presidents have spent several months discussing expansion proposals and have now reached a potential culmination point.
The CFP’s management committee, comprised of 10 football Division I commissioners and Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick, has also been discussing expanding the playoffs.
The board would only approve expansion as a concept, and it would then be up to the CFP Management Committee to oversee implementation. The commissioners are holding an already scheduled meeting next week in Dallas to continue their discussions, but the members are waiting to hear what the presidents decide on Friday.
Despite some calls to expand the current 4-team field to a 16-team field, a 12-team playoff model remains the favorite as commissioners spent a year examining and vetting that proposal.
A subcommittee of commissioners developed a 12-team bracket that was favorably received in June 2021. The proposed model would include six at-large teams and six automatic qualifiers, which would be the six highest-ranked conference champions.
That will likely be the format if expansion settles on 12 teams. Such a bracket could be adopted as a short-term placeholder, with future expansion to 16 teams still possible.
In the end, the commissioners failed to reach a consensus after a drawn-out process that extended from 2020 into February 2022.
That’s when the CFP officially announced expansion talks were dead. At the time, the thought around the sport was that playoff expansion might have to wait until at least 2026 when the CFP’s current TV deal expires with ESPN.
If expansion is instituted in 2024, ESPN would still have the rights to all the CFP games for the final two years of a 12-year deal. A 12-team playoff has been valued at $1.2 billion annually, up from the current $600 million.
In July, at Pac-12 media days, Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff told ESPN that he believed the CFP format had a good chance of changing before the TV contract ends.
“We’re closer than we ever have been to agreeing to a format,” he said. “The lack of agreement about a format held us back from doing it quickly, as opposed to slowly.
Kliavkoff continued, “I said it back when we originally met on this. Once you agree to a format, you can shoehorn that into the existing contract. If we agree on what it looks like past the existing contract, why wouldn’t you try and do it quicker?”
Further conference realignment will also remain a factor in playoff formatting. Reports have indicated that the Big Ten conference is discussing adding as many as five new members beyond the already pending additions of USC and UCLA.
The presidents of the CFP’s Board of Managers also met virtually earlier this month. Briefly, they discussed the possibility of restructuring how college football is governed, with one idea of placing Division I college football under the governance of the CFP, away from the NCAA.
