The College Football Playoff is “95 percent done” with a deal with ESPN that would expand the tournament to 24 teams next season, two people familiar with the negotiations told The Athletic on Thursday. The deal, those sources say, is worth north of an additional $300 million a year.

If completed, it would be a historic and dramatic shift that will place more emphasis than ever on the postseason to determine a national champion and is expected to have sweeping ramifications across the sport.

The CFP management committee, made up of 10 FBS conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director, was scheduled to meet to discuss the negotiations with ESPN, another person briefed on the meeting told The Athletic. Both people spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations remain ongoing.

ESPN has reported that ESPN will acquire all of the additional games and continue to be the exclusive home of the Playoff through the length of its current six-year contract. ESPN is sublicensing five of this year’s 11 games, including the Orange Bowl semifinal on Jan. 14, to be broadcast on TNT. The original deal with ESPN was worth about $1.3 billion per year to the conferences and schools that are part of the CFP.

The field would be made up of four guaranteed Power 4 spots, one guaranteed Group of 6 team and 19 at-large spots, based on the current CFP memorandum of understanding between the conferences that guarantees five slots to a field.

Under a proposed format, seeds 1-8 would earn a first-round bye and host a second-round game on campus. Seeds 9-24 would play first-round games on the campus of the higher seed. The chance to host a Playoff game is part of the incentive of regular-season success beyond just making the field.

Final schedule details still need to be hammered out, but the expectation is that conference championship games will be eliminated on the first weekend of December. ESPN will receive a rebate for the three conference championships that they won, which will be for about half of the money that the new games will cost.

That week will become an off week for CFP teams and the potential spot to play the Army-Navy game. First-round games would begin the second weekend of December on campuses, perhaps as early in the week as Thursday. Second-round games would be the following weekend, also expected to be on campus.

Quarterfinals would continue to be played around New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day at bowl sites, and the semifinals and final would also remain in their scheduled spots at bowl and neutral sites.

The 24-team CFP idea was hatched by Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and his staff late in the summer of 2025 after expansion talks to grow the bracket beyond the current 12-team format had fallen apart months earlier.

His reasoning centered around opportunity and hope. With roster spending ballooning to tens of millions of dollars, too many schools were spending too much money with little hope of making a 12-team field. A 24-team field would keep more teams in the mix, something athletic directors and coaches could sell to fans as success.

The concept was first met with dismissive skepticism, but opinions changed swiftly, and by spring of this year leaders of the ACC, Big 12 and Notre Dame all publicly supported the 24-team plan.

The lone holdout was SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, but even as he cast doubt on such a drastic change and warned of potentially damaging the popularity of the sport’s regular season, many of his constituents warmed up to the idea of doubling the Playoff field.

In August, Sankey signaled the SEC was ready to get on board, and the CFP opened negotiations with television partner ESPN within a week. Sankey sent a memo to the rest of the management committee detailing what the SEC needed to agree to expansion to 24 teams, including a requirement that Power 4 teams play at least 10 games against other P4 competition to qualify for the Playoff.

The exclusive negotiating window between ESPN and the CFP closed last Friday. The CFP then had five business days to present an offer to ESPN, which it could accept and prevent the additional Playoff inventory from hitting the open market. This Friday is the final day of that five-day period.

After Sankey laid out the SEC’s requirements for expansion, all that really stood in the way of a 24-team Playoff was making the money work. The CFP needed to find a buyer willing to pay enough to cover the cost of eliminating league championship games — a necessary move to clear space for an expanded first round — and at least moderately grow the overall Playoff revenue. Those conference championship games are worth around $250 million. Three Power 4 championship games are owned by ESPN, while Fox has the Big Ten.

The move from 12 teams to 24 is the most significant and stunning in the decade-and-a-half evolution of college football’s postseason. After decades of gradual change, evolution isn’t a sufficient description for the event’s latest transformation. Just three years after the 12-team Playoff debuted, this season will be its last, and the size of the field will double.

It was fewer than 20 years ago that some college football leaders were so adamantly opposed to having a national playoff that the mere use of the word was frowned upon. The Bowl Championship Series, born in 1998, set up a No. 1 vs. No. 2 title game to end each season,and for many that was progress enough after decades of polls and a hodgepodge of bowls determining a champ.

The first real postseason tournament in major college football was a baby step. The four-team CFP was devised in 2012 and launched in 2014. Immediately, its impact was evident when Ohio State, a team that would have been on the outside of the BCS title game just a year earlier, made a late-season run to reach the Playoff as the fourth and final seed, then won it all.

The problems with the four-team Playoff also quickly revealed themselves, too, as four spots meant at least one — and sometimes more — power conferences would be left without any representation every year. That dragged down the reputations of conferences that missed out, and it also helped consolidate power among a very small number of schools who kept getting into the four-team Playoff.

Alabama and Clemson met four straight years in the CFP, playing for the title in three of those years, and an undefeated UCF team was left out two years in a row.

A plan to expand to 12 teams started brewing in 2019, was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, was unveiled in 2021 and, after some hard feelings among conference leaders about Texas and Oklahoma moving to the SEC, was finally implemented in 2024.

By the time the 12-team Playoff debuted, it already felt misaligned with radically redrawn conference affiliations. The Pac-12’s demise had cut the Power 5 down to a P4, and the Big Ten and SEC separated themselves from the ACC and Big 12 by adding traditional football powers such as Texas, Oklahoma, USC and Oregon and by insisting on a bigger cut of CFP revenue from the latest agreement among the conferences.

By Year 2 of the 12-team Playoff, the conferences had removed the conference championship requirement for a bye. In Year 3 (this year), all four Power 4 conference champions are guaranteed a spot, and Notre Dame is guaranteed a spot for finishing ranked in the top 12, as the result of a new CFP contract signed a few years ago.

A move to a 24-team field in 2027 will mark five consecutive years with a change to the Playoff’s layout or format.

The move may decimate the bowl industry as college football further reshapes its future and leaves its past behind.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.