The 24-team College Football Playoff is starting to look less like a debate and more like a matter of time.
That was the sense coming out of SEC Tipoff in Mountain Brook, Ala., where commissioner Greg Sankey was asked about the expanded format and didn’t exactly pour cold water on it. He pointed to the same set of issues the league has been working through for months - media interest, where the games would be played and how the regular season would be affected - but his comments suggested the door is wide open.
“I think I've always communicated that we've never said no that that won't happen that won't be a point of support,” Sankey said. “We go back to my last media day visit, which would have been in Tampa (in July), identified the considerations around media interest, around where the games are played, around impact on the regular season, noting that's a judgment that has to be made.
But we've worked through and continue to consider and work through those issues. I think there's an openness to playoff expansion on our part, I certainly think there's an openness.”
Behind the scenes, the machinery is already moving. Television networks, with ESPN mentioned specifically, are putting forward proposals and sorting through the logistics of a postseason that would eventually include 23 games. The NCAA has already taken a step toward making that future possible, announcing that the season will start a week earlier beginning in 2027.
Sankey stopped short of calling anything done, but he made clear that the process is advancing.
“Attitudes change over time, and perspectives change, and so we'll see where that leads us from a final decision standpoint,” Sankey said. “But going through and trying to remember metrics and analytics and predictives that may have come from that is probably incredibly boring, I'd be mostly wrong, but I think, in general, we have achieved some of the progress we'd expect on scheduling commitments.”
For Alabama, the jump from 12 teams to 24 would reshape what success even looks like.
Right now, the Crimson Tide treat a playoff berth as part of the baseline. Getting in is a sign of a good season, and in practical terms it functions like the current standard for an elite program: a 10-win year with championship hopes still alive.
The goal would still be the national title, and no one in Tuscaloosa would celebrate a quick exit. But simply making the field carries real weight in the 12-team version.
At 24, that benchmark gets fuzzy fast.
It is difficult to imagine Kalen DeBoer’s team, which has not dropped out of the AP Top 25 since 2007, missing a 24-team field very often, if ever. So the question becomes what would actually count.
Would Alabama need a first-round bye as a top-eight team? Would it have to win once, twice, three times in the playoff to keep its standing as one of the sport’s true heavyweights?
The broader field would also change the quality of the opening rounds. Every season this decade has featured multiple three-loss teams in the top 24 of the post-conference championship AP Poll, and since 2020 there have been eight four-loss teams in that group. That means the margin for error grows, but the stakes and the level of opposition shift too.
The contrast with the current setup is stark. Last year, Alabama entered as the nine-seed and played Oklahoma in a playoff road game that had the feel of a heavyweight fight between two teams that believed they could win it all.
In a 24-team projection based on the polls, Alabama would have hosted North Texas. In 2024, Syracuse.
That is a very different kind of postseason.
The idea is still months from becoming reality, but the momentum is hard to miss. Sankey and the SEC are clearly aligned with where the sport may be heading, and the commissioner didn’t sound like a man preparing to pump the brakes.
“We'll see if we can finalize those across the nation,” Sankey said. “Go from there, and make some final decisions probably sooner rather than later, in my expectation.”
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