Road To 24: Is a 24-Team College Football Playoff Happening Sooner Than We Think?

Ralph Russo (0:00)

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Bruce Feldman (0:38)

Welcome back to the latest edition of The Audible presented by Trader Joe's. I am Bruce Feldman joined by my colleagues from the athletic Ralph Russo and Stew Mandel. Busy show today. We're going to get to your questions in the mailbag. We're also going to talk about what the heck is going on with the Michigan offense and why is it so bad.

But we are going to start off with a big ticket item, something Ralph has been reporting on a lot. The 2014 playoff, is it actually going to be happening soon? Is it coming together? Ralph, what is the latest? What do we need to know?

Ralph Russo (1:13)

Yeah, and hopefully, if all goes well, there'll be a column that you can read just to kind of get you up to speed on as maybe as you're listening to this podcast or as you're prepping for this podcast, that'll hit the athletic relatively soon. Yeah, like ESPN and the CFP are sort of winding down an exclusive negotiating window where the goal was to figure out, kind of once and for all-ish, hey, how much would you pay for this ESPN? Because until we know, until the CFP and the conferences know exactly how much ESPN would pay for this, they can't truly move forward on plans to implement the thing. They need to know. After the window closes, the exclusive negotiating window closes, then the CFP could conceivably go to the market and peddle it around to other possible bidders, maybe different networks, maybe some streamers. What I've gathered is, you know, I don't think ESPN was too keen on the idea of a 2014 playoff, but once they realize the conferences and the CFP was serious, like, no, we really want to do this.

ESPN loves having college football. They love being the exclusive home of the playoff. ESPN realized, okay, if you guys want to do this, then let's talk about doing this.

A 2014 playoff would eliminate conference championship games. One of the things that will impact the money, we've talked about this, is if you eliminate those conference championship games, they are big ticket items. You have to replace the money that the conference would be losing by getting rid of their conference championship games. All total, that's about $300 million. That's media rights plus some other things, right? So, the bidding is going to have to start here at about $300 million a year.

I don't think this is going to come together super soon. So, we were a little bit on guard. Hey, this window, this exclusive negotiated window is coming up soon. The end of it, October 9th, could they possibly get a deal done within the window where there's a little overage time to stoppage time, I guess, that goes about five days past that? That doesn't seem likely. I think there's a lot of motivation to bring it into the market and kind of see what the market, how the market develops. But guys, like at this point, this thing is going to happen more likely than not happen. And I think if I was a betting man, I would put my money on ESPN remaining the exclusive home of this thing. Again, those things are all changeable. But I just I almost felt like I got to a point last week where I wanted to tell the world like this is not a drill. I need y'all to prepare for this because I'm pretty sure it's going to happen, Stew, who's leading the resistance futilely.

Stewart Mandel (4:20)

Yeah, I mean, that was the message I got from you. We talked about this extensively on Friday.

And for me, that was the sink in moment of like, I've been waiting for the come to the senses moment or for ESPN to lowball them or for the SEC to I mean, I guess one thing we just kind of skipped over and by the way, that's a great way to put it. This is not a fire drill. I think most people were still under the impression the SEC was against it. And now it seems like, no, they're on board if the price is right.

Ralph Russo (4:50)