College Football Playoff Expansion Coming Soon? Big Ten, SEC Automatic Bids

The 12-team College Football Playoff format made its debut in the 2024 season, but changes to the amount of teams allowed into the postseason appear on the horizon. According to reports from Yahoo Sports' Ross Dellenger, the leaders of all the power four conferences met this past weekend in New York to discuss the format of the CFP going forward, with the SEC and Big Ten leading the charge to have more automatic qualifiers for their two conferences.

The Oregon Ducks were the No. 1 seed in the 12-team playoff, and they were promptly eliminated by the Ohio State Buckeyes in the Rose Bowl. After Oregon's loss, the format of the playoff and which teams receive byes was called into question.

The current iteration of the CFP has five automatic qualifiers, with seven at large bids available for the committee to dole out. With the new changes that have been offered up, that number of automatic qualifiers would rise from five to 11, with the Big Ten and SEC receiving four guaranteed spots each, the Big 12 and ACC collecting two automatic bids each, and the group of 6 receiving one.

Under the proposed changes, that would leave just three at large bids to be made available to anyone who did not receive an automatic qualifier.

It’s quite obvious to the average college football fan as to why the Big Ten and SEC would be on board for this. It would insulate their conference and almost act as a fail-safe in case their conference had a down year or one or two of their marquee teams had a few bad out of conference losses.

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ESPN’S Pete Thamel recently reported that the lone wrench that could be thrown in the College Football Playoffs expanding to 16 teams could come in the form of the NFL.

Thamel mentioned that the overlap that college football saw with the NFL last year was worrying: “There’s not a lot of places to put these games right now. The appetite for fierce growth, TV-wise, is likely not to be that high, just because the windows to showcase and maximize them financially aren’t there.”

While the Big Ten and SEC are in favor of making the jump to 16 teams, they will need support from the other conferences to make this happen. The Big 12 and ACC are likely to not be too thrilled only receiving two spots, and rightfully so. The final three at large bids in the new proposed CFP format would likely go to the next best Big Ten and SEC schools, unless an ACC or Big 12 team far and away proved they were worthy of the spot.

What does this means for Oregon and coach Dan Lanning if the new format should be approved for the 2026 season? There would be much more room for error during the regular season. The Ducks could hypothetically get into the newly proposed format with three losses on their schedule, as long as those losses weren’t extremely lopsided or to out of conference opponents.