Josh Pate didn’t waste much time getting to the point after the College Football Playoff’s move to 24 teams became official.
“Playoffs expanded to 24 teams. It’s garbage. I hate it,” Pate said on Tuesday night’s edition of Josh Pate’s College Football Show, a day after the playoff and ESPN finalized a five-year deal worth nearly $1.7 billion.
His biggest issue wasn’t just the size of the field. It was the way the decision was sold. CFP executive director Rich Clark said on a media teleconference that the league understood plenty of fans were against expansion, adding, “We did take into account their sentiment, and that was rolled into this decision, but we decided to move forward with it,”
Pate said he likes Clark personally and doesn’t pin the blame on him, but he viewed the message as a direct insult to fans.
“Your voice was heard,” Pate said. “Your voice just doesn’t matter.”
From there, Pate argued the whole move had little to do with making the season better. In his view, the people steering college football spent too much for too long and are now trying to dig out of the financial hole.
He also took aim at the logic behind the expansion, laying out five claims he believes don’t hold up. One of them was the idea that a larger playoff would push teams to schedule harder nonconference games. That, he said, makes no sense - especially after Florida canceled its 2031 and 2032 home-and-home series with Notre Dame, as Brett McMurphy reported.
“Why would you ever schedule tougher?” Pate said.
“What are they going to do? Drop you out of the top 24?”
Pate also dismissed the argument that playoff games are simply replacing low-value bowl games. In his view, the new setup does the opposite.
“Playoff games are sucking value off of regular season games,” he said.
The Group of Six, Pate said, stands to lose the most. Under the new format, the highest-ranked team from those six conferences gets an automatic berth. But he believes the requirement for power conference teams to play 10 games against power conference opponents will wipe out the nonconference matchups those schools use to strengthen their cases.
“It slams the door in your face,” Pate said. “If you’re smart, you’ll start exploring a Group of Six playoff today.”
He also pushed back on the idea that ESPN drove the change. Pate said the network preferred a 12-team playoff and paid to keep the expanded event from going to the open market. Instead, he pointed to coaches, saying they helped drive the push through the American Football Coaches Association.
“Coaches pushed for this by way of their athletic directors, by way of their presidents, by way of their conference commissioners,” Pate said.
Pate said a 12-team playoff was the right balance because teams can usually survive two losses, but not three. He expects the 24-team format to fail, and he thinks the ripple effects could reach the entire structure of the sport.
“The most important thing to know right now is the conference model is probably on the verge of collapse over the next five or so years,” Pate said.
He said ESPN and Fox negotiate rights deals with conferences, not individual schools, but he expects future money and future platforms to change that. In his view, that could eventually open the door for more programs to chase the kind of independence Notre Dame already has.
“You’re probably witnessing a death rattle here,” Pate said. “Not of the sport. The sport will be fine.”
For now, the 2026 playoff is still set to remain a 12-team field, and this season’s Power 4 conference championship games will be the last played under the current format.
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