Less than two months before a Dec. 1 deadline to decide on a format for the 2026 College Football Playoff, the realistic options are limited, and some leaders are looking to bring in more opinions.

Really, not much has changed since the summer on the issue of CFP expansion. The administrators who oversee the Playoff have been plenty busy with the launch of the newly formed College Sports Commission, the implementation of the House v. NCAA settlement and revenue sharing, changes to the NCAA governance structure and lots of activity in Washington, D.C.

A far-from-fleshed-out Big Ten plan for a super-sized field of 24 or 28 teams went public through media reports in August, but there have been no serious discussions about it.

The most notable development from a short meeting of the CFP management committee — made up of 11 conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director — in Chicago two weeks ago was the Big Ten’s Tony Petitti suggesting to his Power 4 peers that a working group of athletic directors from the conferences be formed to dig into some new format ideas.

“Tony is hoping his guys can convince (SEC commissioner Greg Sankey’s) guys,” a person involved in the discussions told The Athletic.

Sankey did not seem particularly fired up about getting another large group of people involved in the process when asked about it a few days after the meeting in Chicago.

“You know, I love our athletics directors, love that they talk, but there’s specific responsibilities for making decisions,” Sankey said. “We’ve heard all of the ideas. I want to go back to the evaluation of those ideas.”

Right now, there are no meetings on the calendar for the CFP management or presidential oversight committees until the usual in-person gathering held around the national championship game, which is set for Jan. 19 at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla.

The Power 4 commissioners often talk among themselves, which could trigger a resolution. But again, there is a lot of other stuff to talk about right now.

The CFP contract with ESPN sets Dec. 1 as a hard deadline to inform the network of a format for the following season. Without it, a decision might never get made.

With the clock ticking, where is this all going? The Athletic spoke to eight people who have been involved in or briefed on the CFP discussions. Some were granted anonymity to speak more freely about where things stand. The numbers to know are 12, 16 and 24, though think of that last one as more of a range than a specific target.

Stay at 12

The commissioners have repeatedly said that if they cannot agree on a new format, sticking with the one they have is an acceptable fallback.

With each passing day, the odds of that happening rise. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising if sometime in the not-too-distant future, the CFP dropped a news release saying something to the effect of, No change for 2026. We’ll continue to discuss what’s best for college football.

For some involved in the process, and for many fans, this sounds like a fine idea. This season will only be the second for the 12-team format. Year 1 was generally well received, despite some complaints from SEC country about the final at-large selections and a dearth of closely contested games in the early rounds.

A change to the way the teams are seeded has already been made for this season. No longer will the top-four seeds have to come from the five conference champions in the field.

The problem with staying at 12 is that it almost certainly kicks expansion down the road instead of resolving it. It’s a stopgap that buys time for the commissioners to go back to the drawing board and examine other options.

At the core of all this clamoring for expansion is a general displeasure with the selection process. Everybody acknowledges the 13-member selection committee is making a good-faith effort to pick the teams, but nobody seems to be satisfied with how their teams are being evaluated.

Petitti has suggested it is an impossible task, which is a big part of why he has pushed for each power conference to receive multiple automatic bids determined by league standings and play-in games. But support for 14- or 16-team formats with multiple AQs fizzled within the SEC this summer.

The new CFP contracts that go into effect after this season give the Big Ten and SEC the final say over the future of the format — though they do require the two richest conferences to seek input from the others.

The CFP staff has tried to address concerns about the selection process by giving the committee a new strength-of-record metric to help assess the teams and put more emphasis on the rigor of schedules.

The commissioners still seem skeptical about whether the new tool will produce better results, but seeing how it plays out is not a terrible idea.

Of course, the definition of better results changes depending on who you ask.

Expand to 16

The Big 12 put forth a plan to expand to 16 by adding four more at-large bids, limiting automatic qualifiers to the five highest-ranked conference champions.

The so-called 5-11 format appealed to the SEC but not the Big Ten.

There is still some hope within the management committee that an agreement to implement the 16-team, 5-11 plan next season can be reached. Especially after both the SEC and ACC agreed to move to nine-game conference schedules, matching the Big Ten and Big 12.

The Big Ten appears to be the lone holdout, with Petitti still interested in exploring new ideas that would incorporate more AQs.

Still, 16 is probably better than 12 for the Big Ten, so why stand in the way of progress?

“I think Tony would be cutting off his nose to spite his face,” another person involved in the discussions told The Athletic.

Ideally, a decision would have been made long ago, but the CFP could still flip the switch on 16 for next year.

The most challenging part would be when to play the extra early round games and how to set up the bracket. One plan was to have a two-game opening round landing on what is now Army-Navy and Heisman Trophy weekend and giving two teams byes into the quarterfinals instead of the current four. There is also a bracket that uses even more byes and sets up four first-round games and four second-round games flowing into the quarterfinals.

Regardless of how it works, the calendar leaves little room to play a lot of games between conference championship weekend and Jan. 1. The dates of the quarterfinals, semifinals and championship game are already locked in for next season.

Even with a 12-team playoff, the CFP was having a hard time finding TV windows for first-round games that didn’t bump into the NFL or each other.

Still, a bigger field is usually the one thing the conferences can agree upon when it comes to the CFP because they all envision a path to get another team or two (or, if you’re the SEC, three or four) into the field.

Again, ideally, a decision would be made not only for 2026 but beyond, but don’t bet on that. The new contract with ESPN goes into effect next year and runs through the 2031 season. Even if the CFP expands to 16 for 2026, the decision-makers are more likely than not to keep their options open for future expansion — whether fans like it or not.

Go really big

To expand beyond 16 teams and have a postseason tournament of 24 or more teams is complicated. Even if there was a newfound groundswell of support for the idea, pulling it together for next year seems impossible.

While this is another idea birthed from the Big Ten offices, Petitti and his constituents aren’t the only ones who think it is time for an extreme makeover of college football’s postseason.

Athletic directors and coaches around the country all understand the value of not just getting into the CFP but being part of the Playoff race late in the season.

The argument for more (and more) Playoff games — which the former MLB executive Petitti likes to make — is that it keeps fans engaged later into the season. The days of getting fans (and players, for that matter) pumped to earn a spot in some Florida-based bowl game around New Year’s Day are mostly over.

“We’re playing these games anyway, so why not make them Playoff games?” a Power 4 athletic director said.

The framework the Big Ten was toying with internally would eliminate conference championship games and give each power conference the same number of automatic bids. Probably four.

That’s appealing to the Big 12 and ACC. Less so to the SEC, which sees automatic qualifiers as more likely to limit the number of teams it can put in the field. Sankey called AQs a “political compromise.”

As for the Big 12 and ACC, if they are going to have a format foisted upon them by the SEC and Big Ten, it’s important that it doesn’t predetermine which conference is best, which the Big Ten’s initial 14-team, 11-AQ model did.

Where to start on the hurdles with this? First, a playoff of that size starts to strain the importance of the regular season. The Football Championship Subdivision currently plays a 24-team playoff but does not have regular-season games, drawing tens of millions of TV viewers to protect.

As an industry source put it, “Where is the breaking point?”

More importantly, on a practical level, every conference has a championship game baked into its television contract. Making those go away is not so easy.

The SEC is especially attached to its event. The annual game in Atlanta makes the league about $100 million.

It’s easy to say the extra revenue from selling more playoff games would make the conference whole, but Sankey and his members are going to want more than just a promise that it’ll turn out OK.

Major college football might be headed toward a 24- or 28- or even 32-team Playoff sooner than most could have ever even imagined when the 12-team CFP was unveiled in 2021.

But that will require a ton of work, collaboration and focus among college football leaders.

For now, though, inertia seems to be winning the day.

— The Athletic‘s Seth Emerson contributed to this report.