College Football Playoff set to stay at 12 teams for 2026: Why SEC-Big Ten remain stalemated

The College Football Playoff is expected to remain at 12 teams for the 2026 season after the Big Ten and SEC could not agree to an expansion plan, multiple people familiar with the decision told The Athletic, and CFP officials were preparing an announcement for later Friday.

The decision comes as no surprise. The two wealthiest and most powerful conferences in college sports have been locked in a stalemate that goes back to the spring of 2025, when the SEC backed away from a Big Ten proposal that included each Power 4 league getting multiple automatic bids.

Since then, expansion for the 2026 season has seemed unlikely, and additional time to talk about it ultimately made no difference. Friday was the deadline for the CFP to inform ESPN about how big the Playoff will be in 2026, after the CFP management committee received a seven-week extension from the original Dec. 1 notification date from the network.

Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and Greg Sankey from the SEC held one last call about the structure of the CFP on Thursday but to no avail.

Playoff expansion has been on the table since before the first 12-team CFP debuted in 2024. A new deal among the 10 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and Notre Dame kicks in this year, along with a new contract with ESPN, covering a 12- or 14-team event. The new six-year deal guarantees the Big Ten and SEC share equally in about 58 percent of the revenue and codifies a governance structure that gives the two conferences final say over the Playoff format. The other eight conferences and Notre Dame need to be consulted, but an impasse between the Big Ten and SEC could not be overcome.

The SEC supports a 16-team event with teams picked similarly to the way they are now by the selection committee. The Big Ten’s last proposal was for a 24-team Playoff.

Going well beyond 16 teams would have required at least an extra year to be implemented. Petitti put forth a plan where his conference would agree to expand to 16 in 2026 with assurances from the other leagues that they would work toward expansion to 24 teams by 2028 or ’29, multiple people familiar with the discussions told The Athletic.

Unable to strike some kind of agreement to satisfy the Big Ten, the default position for 2026 became the status quo: 12 teams and another year of discussion between the conferences about expansion.

While the number of teams in the Playoff will stay the same in 2026, the format will be tweaked for the second straight year.

For the first two years of the 12-team CFP, five spots were reserved for the selection committee’s highest ranked conference champions, regardless of league. That setup led to two Group of 5 teams — Tulane from the American and James Madison from the Sun Belt — making the CFP this past season when Duke won the ACC after losing five regular-season games.

Starting next year, that can’t happen. The Power 4 conference champions gain automatic entry into the field, with just one more spot available for the next-highest-ranked league winner.

There will still be seven at-large spots available, but independent Notre Dame will also have a guaranteed spot in the field if it is ranked in the committee’s final top 12. In 2025, Notre Dame was ranked 11th by the committee but ended up being the first team left out of the CFP because the lower-ranked G5 teams were guaranteed spots as conference champs.

Expansion beyond 12 teams, starting in 2026, seemed inevitable heading into the spring of 2025.

The Big Ten was focused on a model for 14 and then 16 teams that would de-emphasize the selection committee and its subjective process. The plan was for each conference to receive multiple automatic bids that would be determined by league standings and possibly a series of play-in games.

The ACC and Big 12 were against that plan because they would have received two auto-bids each as opposed to the four reserved for the Big Ten and SEC.

The Big 12 then pushed for 16 teams without the added auto-bids, and SEC coaches jumped on board with that idea, seeing a path for the conference to dominate the field.

Skeptical of putting even more responsibility to pick teams on the selection committee — especially with the SEC and ACC not yet committed to playing nine-game conference schedules — the Big Ten was not on board.

Instead, Petitti later countered with a 24-team model that gave all the power conferences the same number of auto-bids and still left room for at-large selections. Such a format would also require the elimination of conference championship games. That alone made the model all but impossible to implement by 2026 even if it had strong support from the SEC and other conferences — which it did not.

Mississippi State president Mark Keenum made the SEC’s support for expansion to a 16-team CFP clear on “The Paul Finebaum Show” in November.

“I’m not a big fan of automatic qualifiers,” Keenum said.

The extension from ESPN allowed the P4 commissioners to meet in December in Las Vegas. Coming out of that meeting, Petitti was willing to back off automatic qualifiers being part of the 24-team model, other than guaranteeing a spot for at least one Group of 5 school.

The Big Ten also suggested a phase-in of sorts that would guarantee at least two seasons of 16 teams in return for assurances that the conferences would keep working toward 24.

The SEC was unmoved, and the Big Ten did not want to agree to an expansion plan that could essentially be locked in for the duration of the six-year contract. With the SEC and ACC moving to nine-game conference schedules next season, staying at 12 and seeing how the Playoff selections go with all the power conferences playing the same number of league games also had some appeal to the Big Ten.

With the ESPN deadline looming last Sunday, before the yearly in-person meeting of both the full 11-person management committee and the CFP’s presidential board of managers, Petitti offered three guaranteed years of 16 teams in return for a commitment to keep expansion to 24 beyond the 2028 season on the table.

A final call between Petitti and Sankey before the Friday deadline could not break the standstill, and major college football will have a 12-team Playoff to determine its national champion for at least one more season.