College Football Playoff Expansion Gives Linear TV More Premium Inventory — For A Premium Price

After more than a year of on-and-off discussions among the powers that be, the College Football Playoff will officially expand from four to 12 teams by 2026 (but perhaps as soon as 2024).

Reports from Front Office Sports say the TV rights to the larger event could be worth as much as $2.2 billion per year, making it the most valuable college sports property on TV. That’s more than the Big Ten’s recent record deal of more than $1 billion per year and more than the SEC is likely to get from ESPN when that contract is renegotiated as well to factor in 2021’s Texas and Oklahoma additions (taking effect by 2025). If the CFP hits that $2.2 billion mark, it would also double the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament’s $1.1 billion per year rate it’ll collect through 2032.

For university presidents, the motivator to expand the field was clear: Money, as one source also told ESPN in the immediate aftermath.

After years of ignoring the obvious windfall from a playoff at the highest level of college football, the sport caved with a four-team event starting in 2014. Since then, revenues have gone up for all parties involved. But the four-team limitation also creates issues for fan and audience interest throughout the regular season, while also making for a sense of stagnation. Over the course of the event’s eight years thus far, just 13 different schools have participated, with four programs — Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Oklahoma — accounting for 21 of the 32 bids handed out (and six of the eight championships awarded).

Expanding the CFP may not necessarily alleviate the consistency at the top, but more teams involved at least makes the event look more varied, much like the NCAA Tournament does before largely crowning the same handful of programs. Addressing the fan interest issue is part of how the new CFP could command that $2.2 billion figure. The other is just by way of creating new premium inventory for TV when it’s desperate for as much of it as possible.

For instance: An iSpot report from the first half of the year noted that 25.5% of TV ad impressions were attributable to live sports. With these events carrying so much weight for networks, it’s no wonder advertisers are forking over more money to get in front of these remaining large audiences. Networks and streaming services are also paying rapidly escalating fees for rights to games, as just about any recent contract — the Big Ten’s, NFL’s, NHL’s and even MLS’s — will attest to.

Such an environment has created opportunities for certain sports to grow, while also narrowing the field of which companies can actually compete for sports rights at this point. In college sports, CBS and NBC carved out slices of the Big Ten pie but can’t jump all the way into the pool with a new CFP deal. And because of the inherently rural nature of large swathes of college football fandom, you can also eliminate streaming services like Netflix, Apple TV+ and Amazon from contention here despite deep pockets (due to bandwidth requirements and consumer reconditioning required to stream games).

That will leave Fox and ESPN once again as the remaining heavyweights duking it out for CFP rights in negotiations that could come to define the next decade for both networks.

Admittedly, ESPN has a leg up due to its role in the establishment of the playoff, its existing stake in college football’s postseason (including owning several games) and the fact that it didn’t just fork over hundreds of millions of dollars for part of the Big Ten’s rights. Having a better streaming apparatus in place (through ESPN+ and Hulu) to distribute games to the widest possible audience also creates a more appealing sales pitch than what Fox might have to offer.

That said, Fox’s business involvement in the expanded Big Ten likely gives it a larger seat at the table than it may have had in the past. If the network winds up with Big 12 and/or Pac-12 rights in those conference negotiations as well, there’s a clearer path to successfully cordoning ABC/Disney off as the networks of “just” the ACC and SEC. But it’s still going to take a ton of money for either Fox or ESPN to secure these new CFP rights.

As we’ll soon see with the NBA as well, there’s almost no limit to how much live sports TV rights are worth to these networks, which truly need them to survive the current audience shift to streaming. At some point, the cost will outweigh the benefit of gradually shrinking audiences for these programs. But we’re not there just yet, which is welcome news for just about everyone involved with college and pro sports right now.