Hours apart, two bits of data this week summed up college athletics in 2026. The first was a survey of Big Ten football fans from The Athletic’s Scott Dochterman, in which 9 percent of them expressed support for commissioner Tony Petitti’s 24-team College Football Playoff plan.
The second was a list of recommendations from the American Football Coaches Association, which included calling for the CFP to expand to the “maximum number of participants.” Neither group actually has any power to dictate terms to Petitti and his ilk, but you can guess which one of them merits any consideration. And you can probably count on 24 winning out — double the current field, which is triple what the field was in January 2024.
College football is a plastic surgery addict who doesn’t even wait for the puffiness from the previous procedure to subside before going under the knife for another.
Last week, word came that the 76-team NCAA Tournament that virtually no one outside of coaches and administrators wants — 9 percent fan approval on that would warrant an investigation of the polling methods — is essentially confirmed. College basketball is the Mona Lisa, now new and improved for Louvre visitors with a larger smile.
Greed explains much of how we got here, but these unsightly changes are rooted in a search for hypothetical riches, because they won’t necessarily pay off. Because the customer is being ignored and taken for granted. The people who do the most complaining about this era, the millionaires who coach the teams, somehow think fans won’t notice that the bar on acceptable achievement is being lowered.
“It’s not going back,” Houston men’s basketball coach Kelvin Sampson told The Athletic of tourney expansion. “Figure it out. It’s going to help save jobs. Coaches are going to be able to get in the tournament that probably wouldn’t.”
What an amazing comment. Yet quite representative of how coaches think about this stuff.
Let me ask Auburn basketball fans: If you had to live through Steven Pearl’s debut season again, getting to the point in late March that you’d rather watch just about anything but Auburn basketball, but the expanded field resulted in an NCAA bid, would you feel any differently about his debut season? Same question for Indiana fans and Darian DeVries.
Of course not. The same will be true of fans of college football teams that spend and charge like title contenders and sneak into 24-team fields on four-loss regular seasons. Mediocrity is mediocrity. This won’t make it more acceptable.
It will give opportunity to redefine a season in a meaningful postseason, but if magic doesn’t happen? If, on the contrary, the reality of a middling team is reinforced in an emphatic way? People will be unhappy. Money people, the fans whose opinions matter more than ever, will be unhappy. And money people and regular fans share outlooks and message boards.
Athletic directors and coaches who think timelines will be extended, buyouts will be reduced and bonuses will be claimed at a markedly higher rate are delusional. A lot of them, I think, are more realistic than that, but are willing to give it a shot. Because hope is a primary college athletics strategy.
The question isn’t whether these are bad ideas. The question is, which is worse? Football seems the obvious answer at first blush, because going from 12 to 24 is so dramatic and potentially devastating to the regular season.
Petitti and the growing list of suits on his side — opposed by SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, college football’s voice of reason, naturally — will talk about more games mattering. But the idea of elite teams with virtually nothing to play for in November should be concerning. I’m uneasy with anything beyond 16, and wouldn’t it be nice to get a good decade of 12 before the hint of another move?
The CFP is changing at a reckless pace. Then again, the NCAA is messing with something that has been essentially flawless since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. That might just be more problematic.
The general public has tolerated the First Four games since they debuted in 2011 and the field went to 68 teams, because they didn’t alter this nation’s finest sports tradition: getting a bracket filled out by Thursday at noon, then spending as much time as possible watching basketball and as little time as possible working on Thursday and Friday.
Now the unwieldy sucker must be done by Tuesday, and America is supposed to play hooky four days in a row. To watch Auburn vs. Indiana and a bunch of games with even less appeal.
The question of which 2026 college athletics strategy is worse — disfigurement beyond recognition or unnecessary tinkering with perfection — comes down to preference. Not that your preferences are taken into account. When they are, that’s when you know the money is going the other way.