Pete Thamel casts doubt on College Football Playoff expanding past 16 teams

ESPN’s Pete Thamel joined The Pat McAfee Show on Friday to dish the latest on where the expansion of the College Football Playoff stands. Earlier this week, Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported a potential 16-team bracket has “growing” Big Ten and SEC support after an in-person meeting on Thursday in New York.

While he’s expecting the bracket to grow to 16, there’s numerous reasons why the ESPN analyst believes it won’t go beyond that number: “If we get to 16 here, which I would say is a high probability at this point, I have a hard time seeing it jump up from there,” Thamel proclaimed. “I would think 16, you’d have to stay static there for a relatively short period of time.

“Now, 20 years from now. I don’t know how it all works. There’s already resistance from going 14 to 16 in a lot of ways. A lot of this comes down to TV windows. We saw the overlap last year, with the College Football Playoff and the NFL. There’s not a lot of places to put these games right now. The appetite for fierce growth, TV-wise, is likely not to be that high, just because the windows to showcase and maximize them financially aren’t there.”

While some will argue 16 is a larger number than necessary for the Playoff, it seems that’s the format we’re destined to see implemented. Many have joked that 64 or 68 would be fascinating, similar to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament; those fears won’t be realized, at least Thamel doesn’t think they will for a long, long time, if ever.

Continuing, the ESPN analyst provided some more context as to why this expansion will likely be taking place, shedding some light on the stances of Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey. It’s easy to see why both men would want this to come true, as the reported 16-team bracket would include four automatic bids for each of the SEC and Big Ten, according to Dellenger.

“This is the final season we’re going to be at 12. They kind of soft agreed to go to 14 for the next iteration of the playoff. I believe it’s a six-year run, from ‘26 to ‘31. As the discussions have been honed in on that, there’s been recent momentum for the 14-team playoff to go to 16. A lot of this comes down to automatic qualifiers. Automatic qualifiers are controversial, in some sense, because the Big Ten and the SEC are likely to have double what the Big 12 and the ACC have. So, there’s been some pushback on that,” Thamel added.

“As it has gone forward and the conversations have continued, Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti has been very bullish on automatic qualifiers. Greg Sankey, the SEC Commissioner, has been a little more guarded in revealing what his hand is, but the notion that I’ve gotten, especially in the last week, is Sankey has started to align himself more with Petitti on the potential of four. The compromise of all this is to create more spots for the College Football Playoff, which is why 16 has really come into focus.

“… In the SEC especially, and in the Big Ten too, the coaches are pushing for it, they want automatic bids. If the SEC is going to go to nine games, which is appearing more likely, they want that extra protection. They don’t want a conference loss to cross them out. This would essentially keep the top half of each league in the playoff conversation for the entire year.

“Petitti has a background in the NFL, it’s always been his thing to have a Minnesota–Rutgers game, where they’re hovering around .500 have Playoff stakes. It’s like having the 7-8 Jets play the 8-8 Patriots or whatever, Week 15 and there’s a Wild Card bid seemingly on the table.”

All told, the 12-team bracket was widely considered a success, but more seems to be the way of college football over the past few seasons. It looks like 16 teams is inevitable, as Pete Thamel reported, and beyond that is anyone’s guess.