Ross DellengerSenior College Football ReporterTue, April 21, 2026 at 3:54 PM UTC·11 min readDALLAS — This week, members of the College Football Playoff governance committee — the 10 FBS conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director — gather here at their annual spring meetings, pitted in a room for more than 15 hours over two days with the responsibility to govern the industry’s most valuable product.
For more than a decade now, the committee has lived beneath the cloud of a never-ending discussion over postseason expansion — from two teams to four to the current iteration of 12 and, now, the year-long public spat over the next edition of the CFP: 16 or 24.
Through the years, like an invisible fog, the argument lingers, having survived the job term of the committee’s own participants.
But as meetings begin here this week, something altogether new has surfaced.
The CFP committee is not the only group of highly placed executives taking an interest in playoff expansion.
“We asked the government for help with NIL,” said one CFP committee member recently, “and now they’re involved in the playoff.”
Is Congress and the federal government prying into the College Football Playoff?
However, a 14-person presidential “media” committee — its existence supported by the White House — is holding real conversations about the future of the postseason.
In fact, in a fascinating discussion that unfolded last week, the presidential committee identified a variety of ways that the industry can generate more revenue to help financially stressed schools.
“I think it’s accurate to say that there is a coalescing around 24,” said one high-placed stakeholder who is part of both the CFP governance committee and the presidential group.
The 2026 College Football Playoff format is locked in. But it could change to 16, 20 or even 24 teams in the future. (Peter Joneleit/Getty Images)
There is a crossover between the two. The 14-person presidential committee includes commissioners of the Big 12, Big Ten, SEC, ACC and American, plus Notre Dame’s athletic director — all of them CFP decision-makers.
Other members of the presidential committee include ESPN and Fox executives; business magnates like Gerry Cardinale and David Blitzer; Boris Epshteyn, a Republican political strategist and long-time adviser to President Donald Trump; and the committee chair, Cody Campbell, the Texas billionaire and close ally to Trump who’s leading a federal campaign to overhaul college sports along with New York Yankees president Randy Levine.
The growing support for a 24-team playoff not only exists among those presidential committee members working outside of college athletics.
During last week’s meeting, at least three of the four power conference commissioners, and Notre Dame, expressed outright support for, or at the very least an openness to deeply explore, a 24-team proposal, those with knowledge of the meeting told Yahoo Sports.
Noticeably absent from the call was the SEC commissioner, Greg Sankey.
The presidential media committee does not hold authority over changes to the playoff. That power lies with the Big Ten and SEC — two leagues bequeathed such authority by the other conferences two years ago. In fact, the presidential committee's role is only to eventually arrive at recommendations to the White House that may inform a congressional bill.
But emerging from its meetings — two have been held so far — is a movement from commissioners toward a 24-team playoff format that stands to generate hundreds of millions in additional dollars, completely reshape the sport’s regular season and postseason, and perhaps even alter the course of the industry as a whole.
It’s a stark change for a group that as recently as January supported an SEC-backed 16-team format — an expansion attempt that the Big Ten stifled in favor of its own 24-team concept.
Just three months later, are CFP governance members now aligning behind the 24-team model? Perhaps.