What now? Some key changes in the new 24-team College Football Playoff

EDDIE PELLS, AP National Writer

Nov 9, 2026

College football is one step closer to a postseason that will resemble the come-one-come-all nature of the pros.

And yet, the 24-team playoff for major college football arriving next season will not completely get rid of some things that make the sport unique and, often, frustrating.

While four of the 24 spots in next year's playoffs will go to teams that win their conferences, the rest will be entered into the bracket based on the opinions of a selection committee. It's not a far cry from the days of sports writers and coaches weighing in with weekly polls to determine who was best in the nation.

A few of the key points about the 24-team playoff:

Much like this year's 12-team playoff, champions of the four biggest conferences - the Power Four (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC) - will receive automatic spots. The highest-ranked team from the next tier of conferences - the Group of Six - will also be guaranteed a spot.

The last 19 teams will get in based on their ranking by a selection committee that will gather weekly to produce a list of its top 25 - or maybe top 30 - teams in the country.

The top eight teams will receive first-round byes and will host games in the second week of the playoff, starting next year. Teams 9-24 will play opening-round games on the second weekend in December at the home stadiums of the better-ranked teams.

For the quarterfinals and semifinals, games will be at places like the Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl. The final will take place in late January - in 2028, it will be on Jan. 24 in New Orleans.

For decades, the quirky, exclusive nature of college football's "postseason" added value to its regular season. This only seemed to increase once the sport made a concerted effort to crown a national champion outside the old-school poll system. It was best settled on the field, the thinking went, and efforts from the Bowl Alliance to the BCS to the CFP have soldiered through that for years now.

So now comes a 24-team playoff that will almost surely have multiple teams with three or four losses. Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti flipped contends a bigger playoff will add more meaning to more games - especially important now that programs are spending millions to field rosters in the NIL era Now, Petitti argues, teams across the country will push hard for top seeding and first-round byes.

They are going away. Expanding the playoff to 12 teams a few years ago put the writing on the wall for what was once a truly defining experience in college sports. Beginning next year, why do Alabama and Georgia need to meet (and risk injury) in December when they're either a) already guaranteed spots in the CFP or b) could only see their resume get worse with another loss?

In the early 1990s, a chance at securing a league title and a trip to the Sugar or Rose Bowl could be a crowning achievement for a team that was good, but outside the national title mix. A 24-team playoff gives all those teams a shot now, and the league title game is the biggest casualty.

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