The College Football Playoff management committee met in Dallas on Thursday in the latest round of meetings surrounding potential expansion.
Exiting the meetings on Thursday, there was no official update regarding the timeline of expansion of the playoff.
“They made progress. They’re not finished,” CFP executive director Bill Hancock told Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger.
When news regarding expansion broke this summer, a timeline for the implementation of an expanded field was set for 2026 at the latest. Despite this timeline, the hope was that expansion could take place as early as ’24 if the details were ironed out.
A significant issue impacting current expansion talks involves the CFP having to go head to head with the NFL playoffs.
The Atlanta and Miami national title games are currently scheduled for Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 5, 2026, respectively. The management committee, which consists of 10 conference commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, would like there to be 12 days between the conference championship games and the first round of the CFP.
The management committee would also like to keep the national title game on a Monday night.
Here’s the problem: there’s not enough room in the calendar to accomplish those goals and have weekly games. While an easy solution might be to simply move the title games back one week, this would conflict with the NFL’s Monday night wild-card game, which the managers would be reluctant to do.
One potential solution that could make sense is to move the national championship game back two weeks, but that would push the college football season even further into January.
“We like playing [the title game] on Monday nights,” Hancock told Sports Illustrated‘s Richard Johnson earlier this month. “There is no NFL on our Monday nights, so we like that.”
The College Football Playoff management committee plans to meet once again this year to try to finalize the expansion of the field before ’26.
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