What’s going on in the Big 12 and beyond? I expand and explain every Sunday in Postscripts at Heartland College Sports, your home for independent Big 12 coverage.
This week, we’re digging into what the Big Ten wants — and whether it’s actually good for the Big 12.
The Big Ten is Counting to 24 Again
The College Football Playoff will be 12 teams once again in 2026. But that’s not stopping the Big Ten from, you know, being the Big Ten.
Yep, we’re back on the 24-team playoff. Right now, the Big Ten is only talking to a captive audience, its athletic directors and coaches in a working group. I assume the conference leadership will share out later. But, ESPN’s Pete Thamel got the documentation. So, earlier this week, I dug in to take a look. And, you know what?
I didn’t … totally hate it.
Let’s start with this — one of the reasons most of us hate this whole idea of a 24-team playoff is that the Big Ten wouldn’t move off the automatic bid allocation. The league wanted it and the SEC to get four auto bids each, with two going to the ACC and the Big 12. Competitively speaking, that is B.S. and the other commissioners have rightly drawn a line in the sand.
Well, in this version the Big Ten is going with a 23+1 format. The Top 23 teams in the country get in the CFP, with the Group of 6 getting an automatic bid. It doesn’t bar the Group of 6 from getting more teams in, but it only gets one automatic bid. The G6 won’t like that and it’s possible the group could push for more.
But this removes one key barrier for the format. It requires teams to earn it on the field, so to speak. Applied to last year’s rankings the SEC would have gotten seven teams in and the Big Ten would have gotten six. The Big 12 would have had five. That likely would have made Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark happy and, if this gets to the stage of proposal, it might intrigue him. He’s been a staunch 5+11, 16-team CFP kind of guy, which I still contend is the right call.
Big Ten is Relenting?
I believe that Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, who has been on this from the start, sees the resistance to the automatic bids and is relenting — not based on altruism but based on the data. A 24-team format is unlikely to hurt the Big Ten and the SEC. If he’s seeing that in the data, then it makes sense to back off.
The plan would also require programs to give up the conference championship games. That sounds like an easy ask. But Thamel pointed out that it’s harder than it might seem. He wrote that the power four leagues get a combined $200 million in TV money out of those games, before sponsorship, tickets sales, etc.. In a 16-team format, he wrote, there is no way for conferences to make up the money. But they could in a 24-team format.
CFP Calendar Issues?
The format still creates a calendar issue. A 24-team playoff would have to start the week after conference titles games. The first-round games would overshadow the Army-Navy game and detract from one of the best rivalries in the game. Some have written it should move to zero week. The game should not be moved. Any 16- or 24-team format puts the title in mid-January, which in my opinion is too late. The Big Ten’s proposal doesn’t address the calendar. It simply plops several first-round playoff games up against the Army-Navy game. No bueno.
I do like that the Big Ten is moving off the idea that it deserves more essentially because it’s the Big Ten, which is how the whole automatic bid thing felt. But I can’t move off the idea that if the CFP is going to expand to 16 teams that a 5+11 format is the best. I believe conference championships are important, and those titles should give those teams an automatic avenue to play for a national title.
Moving to 24 teams, even in a 23+1 format, to me, cheapens the regular season. It turns the CFP into the NBA playoffs, and I’m not interested in that sort of a dilution of the playoff field. It’s why the powers-that-be in college football have been so resistant to the system in the first place. They know that, at some point, there is too much of a good thing.
This format is too much for me. Let’s play at 16 and be done with it. The Big Ten coaches should take Petitti aside and say, “Hey, we’re OK with this,” just as the SEC coaches did with Sankey last year. Once the coaches do that, then we can get this done.
