With an extra six weeks to talk about it, the conference commissioners who oversee the College Football Playoff are making one last push to expand the postseason format in time for the 2026 season.

ESPN gave the CFP management committee a reprieve by extending a Dec. 1 deadline to inform the network of just how many Playoff games will be played next season to Jan. 23. The deadline will not be extended again.

The options haven’t changed much since late summer:

Stay at a 12-team field with five spots for the highest-ranked conference champions, which is the default if consensus on an expansion plan cannot be reached.
Expand to 16 teams next year by adding four at-large spots to the current bracket.
Expand to 24 teams, which would require more than one year’s notice to implement.

Agreement between the SEC and Big Ten — essential for any change — remains uncertain, but a couple of potential compromises could provide a path to resolution and a larger Playoff for the 2026 season.

If the Big Ten is willing to back away from the field mostly being set via automatic qualifiers — which the league appears to be now, people familiar with the direction of discussions believe — maybe the SEC would be open to doubling the size of the field within the next two or three years?

The Athletic spoke to several people involved in or briefed on the discussions to get an idea of where the possibility of expansion stands heading toward a pivotal in-person gathering of CFP officials, the day before the Jan. 19 national championship game in South Florida.

The odds of expansion seem to be increasing, but this is still very much an active negotiation.

“Expansion is a necessity,” one person familiar with the discussions said. “The question is when and how?”

The SEC has made where it stands more than clear over the last month or so, from commissioner Greg Sankey to Mississippi State president Mark Keenum, who heads the CFP’s board of managers. The SEC wants a 16-team Playoff with as few spots dedicated to automatic qualifiers (AQs) as possible.

Those conference-champ AQs have created angst this year because they led to the inclusion of two Group of 5 champions, Tulane from the American and James Madison from the Sun Belt. Notre Dame and BYU, which finished Nos. 11 and 12, respectively, in the selection committee’s rankings, were left out.

If the CFP were to stay at 12 for 2026, those AQs would be less open-ended, thanks to a new, already-signed agreement between the Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and Notre Dame that would go into effect along with a new six-year contract with ESPN. That means the 12-team Playoff would have featured slightly different guidelines for selecting and seeding the field in all three years of its existence.

Multiple people familiar with the new agreement confirmed that the Power 4 champions would be guaranteed spots in the field no matter where they are ranked, leaving only one spot reserved for the highest-ranked G5 champion. Notre Dame would also be automatically in the field if it ranks in the committee’s top 12, a provision that would have prevented the snub that infuriated the Fighting Irish this season.

Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua first revealed the details of the threshold for inclusion the Irish had built into the next CFP agreement in an interview with Yahoo! Sports on selection Sunday.

Shedding light on the agreement — and its potential consequences — caused some consternation among administrators and has added to the urgency to scrap the current format, expand to 16 and dump automatic qualifiers altogether. But a move like that could be viewed as locking out the non-power conferences, which in turn could create political and legal problems for the CFP.

But that’s more of a secondary issue at this point, with the Big Ten still motivated to look beyond 16 teams.

After the Big Ten’s 16-team model that included multiple AQs for the power conferences failed to gain SEC support this spring, commissioner Tony Petitti and his league pivoted to developing a 24-team model.

Tony Petitti and the Big Ten have developed a 24-team Playoff model, but the earliest it could be implemented is 2027. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

The model, which divided multiple AQs evenly among the Power 4 leagues and still guaranteed access to the Group of 5 (soon to be the Group of 6 when the Pac-12 relaunches in 2026) was presented by the Big Ten to the other P4 commissioners last month.

Expanding the Playoff to 24 teams would be complicated, starting with the elimination of conference championship games and the reworking of TV contracts that include them, and it is not something college football could flip the switch on less than a year out from the 2026 season. Realistically, the soonest a postseason of that size could be implemented would be the 2027 season, but there is at least some interest beyond Big Ten country.

Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark publicly acknowledged being intrigued by 24. The components of the model, which would de-emphasize the selection committee and create a more clearly defined path to qualification through conference play, address a lot of common complaints about the current format and the changing standards of success in major college football.

But the SEC is not on board.

And since the new contract essentially gives the SEC and the Big Ten final say on format, a stalemate between the two conferences means CFP gridlock.

For the Big Ten, staying at 12 for another season has some appeal. First, both the SEC and ACC are increasing their conference schedules to nine games next year, matching the Big Ten and Big 12. Letting another season of the 12-team format play out under those conditions could change minds on how big the CFP field should be.

Second, some of the commissioners want to have the next expansion be the last for the duration of the six-year deal with ESPN. The Big Ten would prefer to keep the possibility of further expansion on the table, including consideration of a 24-team model that includes no automatic qualifiers but reserves at least one spot for the non-power conferences.

With the holidays and the current Playoff in full swing, there are no formal meetings scheduled for the CFP before the one on Jan. 18. The P4 commissioners do speak regularly, with issues beyond the CFP on their agenda.

One productive call between Sankey and Petitti could end all of this, but history suggests that when it comes to the College Football Playoff, nothing gets done until it actually has to get done.

It remains to be seen whether next season’s Playoff format will be determined before this season’s champion has been crowned.