23 Seats and a Folding Chair

The College Football Playoff is going to 24 teams.

On October 15, ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported that the CFP was nearing a deal to expand in 2027. A day later, ESPN reached a handshake agreement to pay about $345 million more per year to air it. Final approvals are still pending.

I should be happy. Twenty-four is the number I picked in my working paper, The Bracket Is the Easy Part. A bigger field, eight byes, first-round games on campus. They built a lot of what I would have built.

But they got the number right and the seats wrong.

Count the seats

Here’s the reported field:

• 4 Power 4 conference champions
• 19 at-large teams
• 1 spot for the highest-ranked Group of 6 team

Four plus 19 is 23 real seats. The 24th is a folding chair pulled in from the hallway, and six conferences have to share it: the American, Conference USA, the MAC, the Mountain West, the Pac-12 and the Sun Belt. That’s 69 programs this season, more than the 67 in the Power 4, all competing for one guaranteed seat.

When the field was 12, that chair was one spot in 12. Now it’s one in 24. The field doubled, and guaranteed access for six of the 10 FBS conferences got cut in half.

They got the number right and the seats wrong.

It gets worse. The chair isn’t even saved for a champion. Starting this season, it goes to the highest-ranked Group of 6 team, whether that team won its league or not. The Athletic reported the change in January, and several Group of 6 leaders didn’t know it had been made.

Power 4 champions get a seat for winning their conference. The Group of 6 gets a chair if the committee ranks them high enough.

The money looks the same. Starting in 2026, the Big Ten and SEC each get 29% of CFP revenue. The ACC gets 17% and the Big 12 gets 15%. All six Group of 6 conferences split 10%.

Credit: The Rich Eisen Show

College football already solved this

Here’s what frustrates me most: the sport already runs a 24-team playoff that works.

Last season’s FCS bracket had 11 automatic bids and 13 at-large teams. Division III has 27 automatic bids in a 40-team field.

At Hampton, it was simple. Back then, Division I-AA, now the FCS, had a 16-team playoff, and half the spots went to conference champions. We won the MEAC in 2006, earned the automatic bid, and hosted New Hampshire in the first round. The title was the ticket.

Division II tried it the other way. When I played at Winston-Salem State, there were no automatic bids. Teams got in through regional rankings. More often than not, the champion got in anyway. But nothing guaranteed it.

In 2015, four years after my last season, Winston-Salem State won the CIAA, beating Bowie State 17–14 in the title game. The Rams finished 6–5, but with the trophy. The CIAA still got two teams in: Bowie State and Virginia Union. To be fair, both had better records. Bowie State came into the title game 9–1, and Virginia Union finished 8–2. But the champion stayed home.

In 2025, Division II made it official. Members voted to give every conference an automatic bid, replacing the old earned-access model, and grew the bracket from 28 to 32 teams. As The Charlotte Post put it, “A Division II football conference title is now worth an automatic berth.”

The CFP didn’t need a new idea. It just needed to copy its own sport.

My plan does that:

• All 10 FBS conference champions get in.
• 14 at-large teams fill out the field.

The whole difference between their plan and mine is five seats.

Championships have to mean something

A conference title isn’t just a line on a résumé. The title game is how a league decides who represents it. If winning that game doesn’t guarantee anything, why play it?

The Power 4 already believe this, for their own champions. This season, the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC champions get in no matter where they’re ranked.

Take last season’s Duke team. Duke went 8–5, won the ACC and finished outside the committee’s Top 25. The old rule took the five highest-ranked champions, so Duke stayed home. Under this year’s rule, Duke would be in, and it should be. Miami was ranked higher, but Duke won the league. To be the man, you’ve got to beat the man. Duke is the 2025 ACC champion. Whoever holds the belt represents the conference. The champ is the champ.

But when the rule changed, the Power 4 protected only their own. The Group of 6 got no fix, and its spot got worse. In that same ranking, James Madison went 12–1, won the Sun Belt and sat 24th. Tulane won the American and sat 20th. Both got in last season, ahead of Duke. Under this year’s rules, they’d be fighting over the same folding chair. If Duke’s title counts, James Madison’s should too.

The Power 4 even get to decide what a champion is. The Big Ten’s February plan would have scrapped conference title games altogether, and the current talks let each Power 4 league pick its own champion. The Group of 6 plays its title games and gets, at best, a shot at the folding chair.

The Power 4 fixed it for their champions. The Group of 6 got a folding chair.

To be clear, a MAC champion isn’t Georgia, and my plan doesn’t pretend it is. Power 4 champions get top-eight seeds and byes. Group of 6 champions get a first-round home game, not a bye. Seeding sorts out who’s strongest. Getting in is a different question, and that’s where this deal fails.

Run last season through my plan and every champion is in: Tulane, James Madison, Boise State, Kennesaw State and Western Michigan. The 14 at-large teams still include Notre Dame, Alabama and the usual names. No committee has to explain who got left out. The rules explain it before the season starts.

“But it’ll water down the bracket”

That’s the usual pushback: weaker champions take spots from better teams.

But only five spots separate the two plans. The 15th through 19th at-large teams aren’t title contenders either. They’re mostly the third-, fourth- and fifth-best teams from leagues that already have a champion in. So the real question isn’t whether a Group of 6 champ is better than the 18th-ranked team. It’s whether winning your conference should count for more than finishing fifth in someone else’s.

My plan still keeps 14 at-large bids, because those spots matter too. Illinois State shows why. The Redbirds opened last season with a 35–3 loss at Oklahoma and closed the regular season with a 37–7 home loss to Southern Illinois. They got into the FCS bracket as an 8–4 at-large team. Then they got hot. They won four straight road playoff games, including a 29–28 win at top-seeded North Dakota State, a team that had beaten them by 17 in October, and lost the national title game to Montana State 35–34 in overtime.

The point isn’t to shut out the next Illinois State. It’s to stop shutting out champions.

The other pushback is that the 19 at-large bids are open to everyone, so the Group of 6 can still earn its way in. In theory, yes.

Now run last season’s final rankings through the new format:

• The four Power 4 champions, including unranked Duke, take four seats.
• Tulane, ranked 20th, gets the folding chair.
• The 19 at-large bids go down the rankings through №23.

James Madison, 12–1 and the Sun Belt champion, was 24th. First team out.

Winning your conference should count for more than finishing fifth in someone else’s.

Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, whose league pushed hardest for 24, says the format protects the regular season through “tiered incentives.” I agree that incentives matter. For a Group of 6 program, there’s no bigger incentive than a conference title. This format tells those programs that a title isn’t enough.

Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould put it simply before the deal came together. Group of 6 schools are investing to compete. “They need to have hope.”

Who holds the pen

This is what my paper is really about. The bracket is the easy part. The hard part is who makes the rules.

The CFP’s management committee includes the 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director. But the SEC and Big Ten hold most of the power over the format, under a deal that runs through 2031. When two conferences hold the pen, the format looks like what those two conferences need.

That’s not a conspiracy. It’s a design choice, and design choices can change. Adding all 10 champions wouldn’t cost the Power 4 a single guaranteed bid. It would cost five at-large spots. In return, every conference’s title game would mean something.

There’s still time

The deal isn’t final. Approvals are pending, and byes and seeding are still being worked out.

If the commissioners want a 24-team playoff the whole sport can believe in, the fix is simple. Ten champions. Fourteen at-large bids. Let the bracket sort out the rest.

Put the folding chair away. 24 seats. Give every champion one.

Donald L. Evans, II posts about whatever’s on his mind. He is a doctoral student researching how coaches and administrators at FCS and Division II schools make decisions about their football programs under NIL and the transfer portal. He played defensive line at Hampton and Winston-Salem State. He lives between Washington, DC and Raleigh, North Carolina, which is to say MEAC and CIAA country, with a lot of small college football within driving distance.