DALLAS — Now that the process to determine how the 12 teams for the expanded College Football Playoff will be selected for the next two seasons is finally complete, an effort that took years, there are already discussions about the possibility of adding more teams for 2026 and beyond.
The CFP management committee discussed the potential of a 14-team bracket Wednesday, along with governance of the playoff and the distribution of growing revenue after the next two seasons. But the 10 Football Bowl Subdivision conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s incoming athletic director did not reach any conclusions after meeting for nearly nine hours in a hotel at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
“Really productive, very collegial, very collaborative,” said Jim Phillips, the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference. “Not everybody loves everything all the time. It’s just one of those things when you have 11 different entities. But I think really a positive meeting.”
That commissioners met a day after university presidents and chancellors who oversee the CFP approved the format for the five highest-ranked conference champions and seven at-large teams for the playoff field that triples in size for the upcoming season. CFP managers first started working on an expansion plan in 2019, though the coronavirus pandemic likely slowed down some of the progress.
The timing is more pressing now on pending and potentially contentious issues, including money, because there is no contract in place for the CFP past the 2025 season.