The College Football Playoff will stay at 12 teams for the 2026 season.
Sources told Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger that college football’s conference commissioners could not agree on an expanded format for the postseason ahead of Friday’s deadline set by ESPN. That lack of an agreement means the playoff will include five conference champions and seven at-large teams for the third straight season.
The CFP is preparing to announce later Friday that the postseason format in 2026 will remain at 12 teams, sources tell @YahooSports.
Barring something unforeseen, communication between the SEC and Big Ten this week did not end in a resolution over expanding to 16 or 24 teams.
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) January 23, 2026
It’s pretty clear that those in charge of college football want to expand the CFP again. They just can’t agree on how they want to do it. The Big Ten and SEC hold the decision-making power for the playoff. The Big Ten wants to double the size of the playoff to 24 teams. The SEC wants a 16-team playoff that adds four at-large teams. There’s been no common ground. Yet.
The wrangling on the playoff format lasted for much of the 2025 season and is set to continue until the playoff inevitably expands … until the SEC and the Big Ten come to an agreement. One option on the table? A 16-team playoff for multiple years before the playoff expands to 24 teams like the second-tier FCS playoffs.
Other conferences are amenable to the SEC’s 16-team idea, but they’re also the minority voices in the room. Thanks to a 2024 vote, the playoff format decisions ultimately come down to the common ground the Big Ten and SEC can find.
A compromise was discussed among the four A4 commissioners that would have expanded the field to 16 for a set number of years before officials agree to shift to a 24-team bracket – a long-term guarantee that the SEC was against making in such an unpredictable environment.
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) January 23, 2026
The 2027 title game is even later
If you thought there was a long wait for the 2026 title game on Jan. 19, you better start prepping for next season. That wait is going to be nearly a week longer.
The 2027 CFP national championship game in Las Vegas has an announced date of Jan. 25. That’s the week after Martin Luther King Jr. day — the date of the first two CFP title games in the 12-team playoff era.
The dates of the other games haven’t been announced, but if the quarterfinals are on Jan. 1 again, it reasons that the semifinals will be played on Thursday, Jan. 14 and Friday, Jan. 15 to prevent a team from playing on less than a week’s rest and having a three-week gap between the semifinals and title game.
ESPN again has the TV rights to the CFP — hence the network’s deadline for expansion talks — and it will sublicense games to TNT for a third straight season. TNT will broadcast a semifinal game for the first time in 2027 in addition to two first-round games and two quarterfinal games. This past season, TNT showed two first-round games while the nine other playoff games were on ESPN’s networks.