SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
College football is about to change again. Starting next season, the college football playoff will double in size from 12 teams to 24. This is a move that could change the way that fans experience the sport. NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan is here to talk about what it might all mean. Hey, Becky.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
DETROW: So we're not talking a few weeks. We're talking next year, right?
SULLIVAN: No. Yeah, exactly. Yes.
DETROW: But how big of a deal is this?
SULLIVAN: I think it's a very big deal. I mean, once upon a time, not all that long ago, college football was a sport where the regular season was the focus. You know, each team played about a dozen games every fall. And if, you know, you were powerhouse that wanted a chance at a national title, your team pretty much had to go undefeated or maybe one loss tops to another very good team. And it meant, I think, for fans tuning in every Saturday that every game truly mattered. That has been changing for a while now. As you mentioned, the playoff is currently 12 teams. But that's only been in place for a few years. Just before that, the playoff was only four teams...
DETROW: Right.
SULLIVAN: ...That made that. And even that, you know, had only been around for about a decade, you know? And in the late '90s, that was when the national championship game even started. So before that, you know, this was a sport where, like, polls picked the national champion. And so obviously, it's been changing. I think this really cements that. I think we're going to see teams in this playoff - expanded playoff starting next year, where, you know, you can lose three or four times in the regular season and still make it, have a chance at the title, and that's going to be a whole new era...
DETROW: OK.
SULLIVAN: ...For the sport.
DETROW: A lot more teams, longer playoffs.
SULLIVAN: Yeah.
DETROW: But how would the format work beyond that?
SULLIVAN: I think it's going to be pretty similar if you've been following the 12-team one. There's going to be five automatic bids. So the winners of the four power conferences - that's the SEC, the Big Ten, the Big 12 and the ACC - the winners of those four conferences will all make it automatically plus the top-ranked team from a mid-major conference. The main difference, obviously, is that the committee that picks the rest of the team will pick 19 teams instead of only seven. And I think what's likely is that most of those 19, if not all of them some years, will be from those major conferences. And so we'll see a lot of these, like, middle-of-the-pack Big Ten, SEC teams participating.
The format is going to be the top eight ranked teams will all get a week off, while the bottom 16 teams all play a first-round game. And then that does, you know, bring up the other thing to note. That is, in order to fit this extra round of games, the four power conferences have agreed to sunset their conference championship games. Those used to be such a big deal to reach and win. And they've been around for two or three decades or so, and so that's a major change as well.
DETROW: I did not realize that last development.
SULLIVAN: Yep.
DETROW: I do not like it myself. I will move forward. I mean, money has changed so much about college sports in the past five or 10 years. I mostly watch Big Ten football.
SULLIVAN: Sure.
DETROW: It is now this cartoonish national conference.
SULLIVAN: Yeah.
DETROW: I mean, is this another variation on that?
SULLIVAN: I think you can definitely see it that way. I mean, obviously, there's tremendous money in this expansion for the playoff itself. Like, ESPN is the network that broadcasts it. They will reportedly pay hundreds of millions of dollars more each season for these extra games on top of a billion-plus-dollar contract they already signed a couple of years ago. I mean, just in broad strokes, expenses in college football have skyrocketed over the last couple decades. A big piece of that, of course, is that players can be paid now. But there's also been massive increases in things like coaching salaries, the size of staffs, investments in facilities, recruiting, travel, just this professionalization of college sports as a whole.
And to pay for all of that, many schools have had to raise millions of dollars every year from alumni, from donors. And I think it was getting hard to convince them that this was a season worth the money if their team couldn't even make the playoffs. So this will certainly help with that pitch, but I think it's hard to know if it's a good move for the sport in the long run.
DETROW: And amid all of this, one important factor is that TV ratings are, like, really down this year - right? - for college football?
SULLIVAN: Yeah, I mean, significantly enough for concern - by about 6% overall, upward of 10 or more percent for some of the networks, and so there's been also a lot of handwringing about attendance this year. And I think, you know, all of that is driving this worry that college football has jumped the shark in a way that it maybe is losing touch with what has historically driven interest for fans. And so I think there's a chance that this expanded playoff will, you know, sort of continue to diminish the importance of the regular season and continue these trends we're talking about.
DETROW: That is NPR's Becky Sullivan. Thank you so much.
SULLIVAN: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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