It took just two years for the College Football Playoff format, expanded from four to twelve teams in 2024, to be killed off for yet another iteration in the never-ending money grab of college athletics. On Monday, all ten FBS conferences and Notre Dame voted unanimously to double the field to 24 teams starting with the 2027 season. Ripples from that decision reach everything: the bowls you grew up watching, the conference championship games we’ve circled our calendars for and, most relevant for our purposes,
Iowa’s place in all of it.
Start with the mechanics. The 24-team field is built from 19 at-large bids plus five automatics: the champions of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC and the highest-ranked team from the Group of Six leagues. Seeding comes straight from the selection committee’s final rankings, 1 through 24, with no boost for winning your conference. A bye comes from a ranking now, not a trophy.
Those seeds mean everything. The top eight skip the first round entirely. Seeds 9-16 host seeds 17-24 on campus in mid-December, and the top eight then host the round of 16 at home as well, so 16 of the 23 playoff games will be played in campus stadiums, up from four under the current format. From there the quarterfinals and semifinals rotate through the six bowls that anchor the current system (Cotton, Fiesta, Orange, Peach, Rose and Sugar), and the first 24-team champion will be crowned in New Orleans on January 24, 2028, with Tampa getting the title game the year after.
Now for what the new format killed. Conference championship games are gone after this season because the calendar simply has no room for them. Regular-season football still ends Thanksgiving weekend, the Heisman ceremony moves up a week to make room and Army-Navy keeps its protected window in a December that now belongs to playoff football. A champion seeded ninth or lower would play 17 games to lift the trophy.
But beyond the nostalgia factor (which frankly went out the door when we butchered the NCAA with the first iteration of the playoff that devalued bowls, paid athletes, mass transfers and bowl opt outs), what does any of this mean for Iowa, the Big Ten and beyond? In short, potentially a lot.
Historical Context
When the new format was initially announced earlier this week, we asked the community for their opinions on it. The overwhelming majority of fans said they view the change as a positive for the Hawkeyes.
On the surface, that seems pretty safe given Iowa’s history as a good but not elite level team most seasons. While they may not always be a top-10 team and are rarely a top-5 caliber team, the Hawkeyes are very frequently a top-25 team. Iowa ranks 27th nationally in weeks ranked since the KF era began back in 1999 at 160 total weeks (35% of the AP polls in that time).
The peak came in October of 2021 when Iowa climbed all the way to #2 in the nation following their top-5 win over Penn State. That peak is a bit of a rarity, however. While the Hawkeyes are 27th in weeks ranked under KF, they fall to 35th nationally in weeks ranked in the top-10 at 37 with only 11 weeks inside the top-5 over that 26+ year period.
Run the new format backward and the “good for Iowa” case makes itself. If you apply the new 2027 rules to the final pre-bowl rankings of every season since 2002, Iowa would have made a 24-team field ten times in 24 years. Twice the Hawkeyes land a top-eight bye at #5 in both 2002 and 2015. Six more times they sit in the 9-16 band and host a December playoff game at Kinnick – Nebraska in 2003, Pittsburgh in 2004, Utah in 2009, Memphis in 2019, Miami in 2020 and NC State in 2021. Only twice do they travel – to Notre Dame in 2023, one ranking spot shy of hosting, and to Miami as the #23 seed last season.
Several of those theoretical playoff games actually happened, just wearing bowl-game costumes. Nine times in that span Iowa’s real bowl opponent would also have been in the 24-team field and Iowa went 5-4 in those games. They lost the 2003 Orange Bowl to #4 USC as the #5 seed, but beat #15 Florida, #11 LSU and #9 Georgia Tech in January trips and handled #14 Vanderbilt just last season. Four of the nine were adjacent-seed matchups. History has been staging Iowa playoff games for two decades and calling them something else.
It Just Means More
So on the surface, the new format likely means Iowa gets more bites at the apple as a team that historically would have made a 24-team playoff around 40% of the time. Even better, their style of play has helped them compete against teams with more talent and in hypothetical playoff matchup historically played as bowl games, Iowa has won more than 50% of the time.
But how have past evolutions in the process impacted who ultimately gets included in the playoff field? In short, a lot.
When Kirk Ferentz first took over, college football was in year two of the BCS era. For 16 seasons there was no playoff, just a two-team championship bracket built on the computers. In that 16-year span only three Big Ten teams were represented (9% of the total pool) while 11 teams from the SEC made the title game for a whopping 34% of all potential “playoff” spots.
When we left the BCS behind and went to the first actual playoff in 2014, things started small with only four teams. That lasted through 2023 and in those ten seasons, the SEC’s share of spots fell just slightly to 30% (12 appearances). The Big Ten, meanwhile, jumped up to 23% share of potential spots with 9 teams being represented in that span.
Perhaps most notably, since paying players for their Name, Image and Likeness became legal (which is to say, since the playing field was leveled between the SEC and the rest of the world) in 2021, the Big Ten’s share of playoff spots under the old 4-team format jumped to 33% – dead even with the SEC in that same span.
Over the last two seasons in the new 12-team format (and those same NIL rules), the Big Ten has accounted for 29% of all playoff spots with the SEC holding steady at 33%.
But what about under the new 24-team format? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems to benefit the SEC quite a bit. While the SEC would have only gotten 22% of the playoff spots dating all the way back to 2002 (with the Big Ten at just 17%), they would have held at 26% post-NIL reform (vs the aforementioned 33% in the 4- and 12-team formats) while the Big Ten would drop from 29% to 18%.
Which is to say the lower end of the rankings tend to have more SEC teams than Big Ten teams. Does that mean the SEC has been deeper than the Big Ten since 2021? Maybe. Could it mean the SEC has been propped up by the circular reference in the polls over that same time? Also plausible.
Dollars and Sense
Whatever the reason, the SEC is poised to cash in on the new playoff format. Yes, the Big Ten will certainly make plenty of money, but nobody is set to make more than our neighbors to the south.
How so?
Well, the new format comes with a new TV contract and a different payout structure. ESPN pays about $1.3 billion a year for the current 12-team playoff, which works out to about $118 million per game. For the 12 new games the expansion creates, the network will pay a reported $1.7 billion over five years – about $340 million annually, or $28 million per game.
In other words, the playoff doubled its inventory for a 26% raise in pay from ESPN. If that sounds a little low, consider that the package was never put on the open market for bidding. That wasn’t an oversight, the 2024 extension handed ESPN exclusive negotiating rights to any expansion beyond 14 teams, plus the right to match any outside offer.
Dig a little deeper and much of the new money isn’t new at all. ESPN was already paying about $140 million a year for the SEC, Big 12 and ACC championship games that just got eliminated as part of the expansion. That’s money it now keeps, cutting its truly new spending to about $205 million a year.
Fox gets back the $50 million or so it paid for the Big Ten title game and ends up completely shut out of the postseason. The swap from title games to playoff games is close to a net zero for the conferences themselves. But here’s the rub – the money the Big Ten used to collect from its own broadcast partner now arrives in a check written by ESPN, a network it otherwise has no contracts with.
Follow the check from the network to the field and it passes through two doors. Door one: the CFP pays conferences, not schools, in fixed shares – the SEC and Big Ten each take about 29% of the pot, the ACC 17% and the Big 12 gets 15%. Those shares never move no matter how many teams a league places or how far they go.
Importantly, performance payouts are dead. Making the field now earns a conference a $3.18 million expense check per round and nothing more, while the reported expansion money layers on top, with the SEC and Big Ten getting $80-100 million a year apiece and the ACC and Big 12 $50-70 million.
Door two: each league splits its pile by its own rules and the rules are wildly different. The Big Ten pools every playoff dollar and cuts it 18 ways, so Iowa’s check is identical whether the Hawkeyes host a December playoff game or go 5-7. The SEC lets its playoff teams skim $3-4 million per round off the top before pooling the rest. The ACC lets schools keep all of it – Miami pocketed its full $14 million last season.
In the new format, the money lands in conference offices on a schedule set before the bracket is ever filled and the only playoff dollars a team can still earn with its play are the ones attached to its own stadium. Hosting is where the new format concentrates its rewards and the early returns on campus playoff football have gone beyond the payout. On-campus hosts in the 12-team era are 6-2 with an average winning margin of 13.5 points. The four 2024 home teams went 4-0 straight up and against the spread.
Bye teams have been the opposite story, going 1-7 in quarterfinals, but those games were played at neutral-site bowls. In the FCS playoffs, which have used this exact structure for years (24 teams, eight byes, campus sites), bye seeds hosting their first game are 13-3 and the last three champions were seeded 1, 2 and 2. What seems to flip a bye from a curse into a cheat code is the home stadium – exactly what the new format hands the top eight.
So who gets those rewards? The 16 hosting slots map one-to-one onto the committee’s top 16. Run that on last season’s final rankings and the SEC claims seven of the 16 home dates plus four of the eight byes; run it on this week’s rankings and the SEC again holds four of the top eight. Good for Iowa, whose natural habitat is the 9-16 band and a would benefit from a packed Kinnick in December. Quite possibly even better for the conference that keeps stacking the committee’s top ten.
For Iowa specifically, the arithmetic is modest. The only new dollars an Iowa playoff run puts directly in Iowa’s pocket are the concessions, parking and expense stipend from a home December playoff game, because the CFP collects the campus gate itself and pours it back into that shared pool. Hosting isn’t just the competitive prize in this format. It’s the entire financial one.
Which brings us back to the network, because the flip side of fixed payouts is that exactly one party’s revenue still depends on who makes the field: the one selling the ads. The only real counterweight to ESPN’s desires to load the playoff with their SEC partners is the fact the biggest single audiences of the 12-team era have been Big Ten games, including the 30.1 million that watched Indiana beat Miami for the title last year.
But the structural fact remains: there is now no real way to stop ESPN from propping up the SEC to fill as many spots as they can in the CFP and the network has millions of reasons to do so. That is not so good for Iowa.
