by Allen’s grandfather joins in.
The Rose Bowl has agreed to change its contract to pave the way for a college football playoff extension in two years after a months-long delay, sources say sports illustrated. The CFP is expected to announce soon that the playoffs will expand from four teams to 12 starting with the 2024 season.
While logistical hurdles remain to be overcome, the delay in bowl play presented the greatest obstacle in early expansion. In several proposals to CFP officials, the Rose Bowl, the oldest active operating bowl, requested guarantees of its traditional date and time to retain in future iterations of the playoffs, which the CFP board refused to do. For the playoffs beyond 2025, few, if any, guarantees can be given due to the lack of a contract.
A few weeks ago, the CFP gave the Rose Bowl a month-end deadline to decide its own fate, SI reported Monday. In many ways, the Rose Bowl was holding the CFP hostage and risking its own share of future playoffs.
The Rose was able to single-handedly delay playoff expansion. CFP officials needed unanimous approval from the six CFP bowls to expand the playoffs to 12 teams before the contract with ESPN expires after the 2025 playoffs. Five of the six shells — Sugar, Orange, Fiesta, Peach, and Cotton — supported amending the contract to expand early.
The Rose could have cost college football the additional $450 million in extended playoff revenue in 2024 and 25 and 16 additional playoff spots. A decision to delay further may have torpedoed his legacy and shattered any goodwill among senior playoff decision makers.
The decision brings the sport to a historic moment. For the first time in major college football history, a full-fledged playoff will decide the champion.
The Rose Bowl will continue to host college football playoff games after much dismay.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
More than two months ago, CFP executives unanimously approved an expanded 12-team playoff to begin no later than 2026, the first year of a new CFP contract with the six bowls and one or more broadcast partners. The format is as follows: (1) The top six champions automatically get slots; (2) the next six top-ranked teams will receive vacancies; (3) Byes go to the top four conference champions; and (4) first round matches will be played at the home stadium of the higher-seeded player and quarter-finals and semi-finals will be played on a six-bowl rotation.
The 10 FBS commissioners, along with Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swabrick, have spent the past few weeks not focusing on 2026 and beyond, but rather on expanding into ’24 or ’25. At each meeting, the commissioners resolved a plethora of issues, most notably the scheduling of eight additional playoff games, the revenue distribution model, and the logistics of hosting the first round on campus grounds.
The commissioners have set tentative dates for the four rounds of the expanded CFP, but nothing is concrete.
– The first round will be played in the third week of December and is expected to start on Friday and Saturday.
– The CFP quarterfinals are scheduled around New Year’s Day, with three quarterfinals likely to take place on New Year’s Day and one quarterfinal on either New Year’s Eve or January 2nd.
– The semi-finals are scheduled about a week later, depending on the year. In 2024 that would be the weekend of January 10th to 12th. With NFL playoff games this weekend, Thursday and Friday could be the best options.
– The Championship game is expected to be pushed back a week or two from its original schedule and will remain on a Monday.
Future iterations of the playoffs beginning in 2026 will likely have a different look — not in format, but in schedule. There is serious discussion about moving the entire regular season calendar up a week, turning week 0 into week 1, and moving the conference championship weekend from December to Thanksgiving weekend. That would also move the rivalry weekend up a week. It offers more flexibility for such a tight December window while also ensuring the sport doesn’t stretch too deep into January.
The Rose’s decision ends an 18-month process of pettiness, frustration and hostility among an FBS commissioner group that couldn’t agree on a format. The troubles were so bad that their bosses, the FBS presidents, took control of the expansion and on September 2 approved a plan that would take effect no later than 2026. They encouraged commissioners to consider extending it to 24.
The ramifications of an extended playoff are far and wide. Perhaps more importantly, the expansion over those two years offers a total of 16 new opportunities in a sport that has struggled to establish parity. The playoff era was marked by a parade of the same teams from the same leagues advancing into the postseason.
For example, in the eight-year CFP era, six teams took 25 of the 32 playoff spots (78%). Last year, three of the five power conferences failed to make the playoffs — the second time this has happened in the CFP’s eight years. The Pac-12 and Big 12 combined have qualified six teams for the eight playoffs – the same number as the Big Ten. The SEC qualified 10 and the ACC qualified eight.
The expansion won’t solve a decades-old esports parity problem, but it’s expected to at least create more important late-season matchups for more programming. Even at the end of November, up to 30 teams could still be alive to form the field. Take this year. Before the finals weekend, there are no more than six teams with a realistic chance of making the playoffs. In a 12-team edition, that number would swell to more than 20.
“Having more teams in the mix would be a good thing for college football overall,” said Bob Bowlsby, the former Big 12 commissioner who helped develop the 12-team model, in January. “We don’t always need the same teams. It reduces interest in the event nationally.”
College football’s postseason will now reflect other NCAA sports more closely. A four-team playoff comprises only about 3% of college football teams. Most NCAA postseason fields include at least 10% of a sport’s total teams, e.g. B. in basketball, baseball and softball.
The Rose Bowl, historically protected by long-standing ties with the Pac-12 and Big Ten, dashed almost all hopes of expansion any time soon. To delay her decision, the Rose sent at least two different proposals outlining her wishes to the CFP Board of Directors, an 11-member group of FBS presidents who govern the playoffs. While bypassing deadlines set by CFP officials, the Rose initially requested that their exclusive Jan. 1 window be retained in future playoffs, which CFP executives refused. In the expanded playoff format sanctioned by the Presidents on September 2, the six bowls would alternately host quarterfinals and semifinals. If the playoff game does not fall on New Year’s Day, the Rose wanted to host a non-CFP game featuring teams from Pac-12 and Big Ten in an exclusive window at their traditional date and time.
In its latest proposal, the Rose Bowl said it would give up the exclusive window to host two of its three-year rotations in exchange for hosting a New Year’s Day semifinals — a request that CFP presidents also turned down.
Months, if not years, of frustration over the Rose Bowl’s positioning came to a head this week when a senior CFP executive even suggested removing the Bowl from the six-bowl rotation beginning in 2026 if he didn’t agree to an early expansion.
“It’s human nature that if they’re not willing to work with us, there needs to be a real discussion about the future of the Rose Bowl,” says the CFP source. “And it doesn’t have to be unanimous.”
More college football coverage:
• Playoff Ladder Reaction: The Good, Bad, and Ugly
• What a 12-team CFP playoff would look like this week
• Predicting every conference championship game
