The drama surrounding the College Football Playoff has for at least one year resulted in no change.
The CFP will remain in a 12-team format for next season, Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports was first to report Friday, as the SEC and Big Ten were unable to resolve differences over whether to expand to 16 or 24 teams. The Big Ten continues to advocate for a 24-team field, a bridge too far for the SEC and the other conferences, which for now prefer a 16-team field.
An official announcement is expected later Friday, the deadline by which the CFP had to inform ESPN of next year’s format. That deadline was itself pushed back from the original date of December 1.
This past season was the second of the 12-team playoff era, with Monday’s Indiana-Miami National Championship delivering the largest college football audience since the first year of the playoff in the 2014-15 season (with the caveat that Nielsen has changed its methodology over the past year in ways that generally benefit sports viewership and skew comparisons to prior years).
The national championship audience figures to quiet some of the concerns about how the elongated postseason schedule is impacting viewership, though perhaps not for long. Next year’s title game is set for January 25, the latest date yet.
And the strong performance of the national championship does not change the difficulty the CFP has had scheduling its first round and semifinal games around the NFL. Both rounds were down this year, with the first round taking a hit from increased NFL competition and the semifinals — which took place on weeknights to avoid the NFL playoffs — the least-watched in the history of the CFP.
For as much difficulty as the CFP has had scheduling a 12-team playoff, a 16 or 24-team field would have been even more complicated, necessitating the potential relocation of the Army-Navy Game or, under some proposals, the elimination of the conference championship games. For now, those cans have been kicked down the road.
