College Football Playoff Reaches Handshake Deal With ESPN for 24-Team Field From 2027

UNITED STATES · SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2026

College football's playoff has been four teams, then twelve, and — if a handshake becomes a signature — it is about to become twenty-four. ESPN's Heather Dinich reported on Friday, October 16, that the College Football Playoff has reached a “handshake agreement” with ESPN to broadcast a 24-team playoff beginning in 2027, a development reported by Athlon and Bleacher Report. Those two words, handshake agreement, do a lot of work in that sentence, and they should. This is the biggest step yet toward a 24-team future, and it is not yet a done deal: formal paperwork and board approval from all parties are still required. But handshakes in deals of this size do not happen by accident, and the numbers now attached to this one are very real indeed.

ESPN's Pete Thamel reported the financial framework, via Athlon and theScore: ESPN would pay an average additional $345 million per year over the next five years, on top of the average $1.3 billion annually it already pays under the existing six-year, $7.8 billion deal that runs through the 2031-32 season. Read that again slowly. The playoff is not replacing its television money; it is adding roughly a third of a billion dollars a year on top of it, for the right to show a tournament twice the size of the current one. Whatever anyone thinks of a 24-team field as a sporting proposition, as a business proposition the direction of travel could hardly be clearer.

The 19+4+1 format, explained

The format under discussion, as reported by Sports Illustrated, theScore and the New York Post, breaks down as “19+4+1”: 19 at-large bids, the four Power 4 champions as determined by each league, and the highest-ranked Group of 6 team. Seeds 1 through 8 would receive a first-round bye and then host a home game. Seeds 9 through 16 would host first-round games. The first two rounds would be played on campus, with the New Year's Six bowls hosting the quarterfinals and semifinals. If you love the idea of playoff games in college stadiums in December — snow, noise, students, all of it — this format is built for you: it puts more meaningful games on campuses than any version of the playoff that has ever existed.

The knock-on effects are just as significant as the bracket itself. The change is expected to eliminate the Power 4 conference championship games and move the start of the season a week earlier. Sit with the first of those for a moment. Conference championship weekend — a fixture of the sport's calendar, and a money-maker in its own right — would be sacrificed to make room for the expanded field. That tells you how completely the playoff has become the centre of the sport's gravity: even its own conferences' title games are now negotiable in service of it.

How we got here: four, twelve, and a December 1 deadline

Some background, because the speed of this is easy to lose. The playoff field was four teams from 2014 through 2023 — a full decade of arguments about the fifth team. It expanded to 12 in 2024. And now, barely into the 12-team era, the sport is deep in negotiations to double it again to 24, with a deadline of December 1 to approve changes in time for the 2027 season, per the reporting around the talks. Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti championed the 24-team model, while SEC commissioner Greg Sankey initially preferred 16. Sankey said on Wednesday that “some final decisions” would likely come “sooner rather than later” — a quote that reads rather differently forty-eight hours after a reported handshake. In September, the CFP management committee said it had decided to move forward evaluating expansion to 24 by beginning media-rights discussions with ESPN, while stressing that was not yet a decision. The handshake, if it holds, is what that evaluation produced.

We have been following this at Previously since the sides were, as we put it in our October 12 coverage of the expansion negotiations, still just talking. Friday's reporting is a different category of development: not a meeting, not a preference, but a reported agreement in principle with the broadcaster, with a price tag attached. Deals can still stall on paperwork and boards — that caveat is in the reporting itself, and it belongs in ours — but a $345-million-a-year handshake is a strange thing to walk back from.

What 24 would actually change

For teams, the practical effect is enormous. In a 24-team field with 19 at-large bids, the line for a successful season moves completely: a three-loss Power 4 team with a strong schedule is no longer playing out the string in November, it is playing for seeding. For fans, the on-campus first two rounds are the prize — the 12-team format's home first-round games were widely considered its best feature, and this framework multiplies them. For everyone who preferred 16, or 12, or even four, the counter-argument writes itself too: a regular season that once eliminated teams weekly now eliminates far fewer, and something of that old cruelty — the thing that made every Saturday feel lethal — goes with it. Honest coverage has to hold both of those truths at once, because both are true.

What happens next is procedural, and the procedure matters: formal paperwork, board approval from all parties, and that December 1 deadline for 2027. Until the signatures exist, this remains a handshake — the biggest, richest handshake in the sport's history, but a handshake. We will update this story as the approvals land or stall, and you can follow the rest of a busy college football Saturday on our Sports front.