A day after the College Football Playoff made its 24-team format official, executive director Rich Clark went on the Andy & Ari On3 show Tuesday and turned to a part of the fan feedback that had been buried under Monday’s backlash.
During Monday’s media teleconference, Clark acknowledged that many fans opposed expansion and said their sentiment was weighed before the CFP Management Committee voted unanimously to double the field. The coverage that followed centered on the CFP moving ahead anyway.
The College Football Playoff logo is painted in the endzone prior to the Cotton Bowl between the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Miami Hurricanes at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas on Dec. 31, 2025.
Talking with On3 a day later, Clark shifted to the other side of what the CFP heard from fans.
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“We also listened to what they did like about the playoffs, and we tried to add more of those things that the fans wanted into the format that we have. Ultimately we have to make it so spectacular that fans are just going to love it,” Clark said.
What did fans like that the 24-team playoff gives them more of?
Under the 12-team bracket, only the four first-round games went to campus sites. Starting in 2027, seeds 9 through 16 host first-round games and the top eight seeds host second-round games, with both rounds at the higher seed’s stadium.
That takes campus playoff games from four a year to 16 and hands a home playoff Saturday to 16 fan bases instead of four. The first 12-team bracket put that atmosphere in Notre Dame Stadium, Beaver Stadium, Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium and Ohio Stadium in December 2024, and it is the feature of the 12-team era the new format leans on hardest.
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The format also comes with scheduling standards that expect power-conference teams to play 10 qualifying games, counting conference games and nonconference games against other Power 4 opponents, while the committee will credit only one FCS win per season. Both pieces point toward better September football.
What fans give up for the extra campus games
The Power 4 conference championship games are eliminated, with each league’s champion decided by regular-season standings and tiebreakers, which makes this season’s title games the last ones. Last year, the Big 12 title game between the Texas Tech Red Raiders and BYU Cougars drew a sellout crowd in Arlington, Texas.
ESPN will pay about $345 million more per year for the expanded playoff, and it will recoup about $140 million a year from the canceled SEC, Big 12 and ACC title games, per Dinich’s report, while Fox recoups about $50 million for the Big Ten’s.
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The fan favorite that adds 12 new playoff games to ESPN’s inventory was expanded, and the fan favorite that sat outside the playoff and competed with it for a December Saturday was cut.
His promise that fans will love the result gets its first test the second weekend of December 2027, when eight campuses host the opening round of the 24-team bracket.
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The post CFP’s Rich Clark shares telling detail about how fans shaped the 24-team playoff appeared first on Gridiron Heroics.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com
