The College Football Playoff is on track to get a lot bigger in 2027, and if the current rankings are any indication, the sport is headed for a bracket that would look very different from the one fans know now.
Sources confirmed to CBS Sports' Matt Zenitz that the CFP and ESPN are nearing completion on a new television contract for the expanded format. The final details still haven’t been locked in - especially how many spots go to at-large teams and how many are reserved for conference champions - but the expectation is that the 24-team setup would do away with conference championship games. That would make tiebreakers even more critical in the mega-conference era, where not every team plays each other.
The projected model gives the top eight seeds a first-round bye, while No. 9 through No. 24 would meet in eight opening-round games. Using the final rankings before the 2025 conference championship games, the bracket would have shaken out like this:
Ohio State, Indiana, Georgia, Texas Tech, Oregon, Ole Miss, Texas A&M and Oklahoma would have been the eight teams sitting out the opening round.
The first-round pairings would have been: Alabama vs.
North Texas Notre Dame vs.
Iowa BYU vs.
Georgia Tech Miami vs.
Houston Texas vs.
Tulane Vanderbilt vs.
Michigan Utah vs.
Arizona USC vs.
Virginia
If automatic byes for conference winners are removed, the seeding itself wouldn’t change. All four Power Four programs that would have won their conferences through tiebreakers were already inside the top 24.
That setup would have given Oregon, Ole Miss, Texas A&M and Oklahoma byes instead of first-round games. It also would have opened the door for 13 teams that would not have made a 12-team field: Notre Dame, BYU, Texas, Vanderbilt, Utah, USC, Arizona, Michigan, Virginia, Houston, Georgia Tech, Iowa and North Texas. James Madison would have been the team just outside the cut.
A 24-team playoff also creates the kind of first-round matchups that feel far more even on paper. In 2025, nearly every game after the first two would have had real appeal, with several pairings that would have sounded impossible as College Football Playoff games not long ago.
The expanded format would also stack another game onto the path for anyone outside the top eight - and even for teams near the top. Miami, for example, would have needed to get through Houston before running into Oregon in the second round. National champion Indiana would have been slotted against the Utah-Arizona winner before potentially drawing the winner of Texas A&M against Notre Dame or Iowa.
There’s also a human factor here. A deeper field could change the way the committee looks at the rankings, and there’s a real chance the top 25 would have been different if the cutoff had been further down the board. Tulane and North Texas might both have gotten in, or perhaps more Power Four teams would have filled those slots instead.
That debate gets settled in 2027, when college football’s next big playoff overhaul becomes reality.
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