The expanded College Football Playoff is changing the math for everyone, and Josh Pate thinks the ripple effects could eventually swallow the Big 12 and the rest of the Power Four.
Speaking Thursday on ESPN’s Get Up, Pate said those leagues are living “on borrowed time,” a blunt assessment that fits the moment college football is heading into. The playoff is set to grow to 24 teams next season, which means this year will be the last 12-team field after the sport moved beyond four teams for the 2024-25 season.
That shift has already pushed the Power Four to make another major change. Not long after the playoff expansion was announced, each of those conferences, including the Big 12, said its championship game would be discontinued next year.
Pate has been skeptical of where all this is headed for a while. His view is that conference titles lose much of their meaning once the playoff itself gets bigger and bigger.
The old reward structure is gone. A league champion no longer gets the same kind of automatic payoff it once did, whether that was a guaranteed playoff spot or, under the BCS, a marquee bowl or a shot at the national title.
Even now, champions still receive an automatic bid, but the door is wide enough that a team with 7 or 8 wins could, in theory, still grab one of the 12 spots.
And that raises the bigger issue Pate keeps coming back to: what exactly is the point of a conference if the championship game becomes a non-factor? Coaches have to weigh whether it makes sense to play another high-stress contest after a 12-game regular season before heading into what could be a six-week postseason run.
He also pointed to the way scheduling is already shifting. Conferences are trimming strength-of-schedule requirements to shape their non-conference slates, which leads to a natural question about whether schools might eventually want even more freedom. Why not build the whole schedule the way Notre Dame does?
From a practical standpoint, Pate said it still makes sense for programs like Texas Tech or Utah to stay in the Big 12 and keep that playoff path intact rather than going independent or chasing another conference setup. But he said the long-term question is unavoidable: how long does this model last, and when might it start working against a school’s growth?
The departure of Yormark will also affect how the Big 12 positions itself in the television market and how it sells itself against the SEC and Big Ten in this next phase of the College Football Playoff.
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