Conference championship weekend, a fixture of the college football calendar for roughly three decades, is on its way out. Playoff officials confirmed on Monday that the College Football Playoff will grow from 12 to 24 teams starting with the 2027 season, and ESPN has signed on to broadcast every game of the bigger bracket.
The new five-year agreement is worth close to $1.7 billion, or about $345 million a year, layered on top of the six-year, $7.8 billion contract signed in 2024. ESPN keeps exclusive worldwide rights, the option to sublicense selected games, and plans to put at least three first-round and three second-round games on ABC. Instead of 11 playoff games per season, fans will get 23.
Five places go to automatic qualifiers: the four Power Four conference champions and the best-ranked team from the Group of Six. The other 19 are at-large picks by the selection committee. The top eight seeds earn a bye, and the opening two rounds will be hosted by the higher seed, putting 16 playoff games on college campuses. After that, the bracket moves to the big bowls such as the Rose, Sugar and Orange for the quarterfinal and semifinal stages.
The calendar shifts too. Every team will open in the week before Labor Day and wrap up its regular season on Thanksgiving weekend. The first 24-team field is due to be revealed on 28 November 2027, with the title game set for 24 January 2028 in New Orleans. Independent Notre Dame gets no guaranteed berth, and the Army-Navy game stays a standalone date.
Executive director Rich Clark promised to make the new format “spectacular”, and the appetite seems to exist: some 30.1 million people tuned in when Indiana met Miami in the most recent title game. This winter’s bracket will be the last with 12 teams, ending on 25 January 2027 in Las Vegas.
