Shehan Jeyarajah

Right now, at 12, ESPN owns all of the rights to the college football playoffs.

16, they would still probably own at least the vast majority.

One of the reasons that Fox especially wants to go to 24 is because they want to be able to potentially bid on those remaining games.

And, you know, there might be some brinksmanship from that perspective of ESPN wanting to hold off Fox and getting to kind of still own the college football playoff the way that they have for the first 12 years of it.

So, you know, there's a lot of different dynamics, you know, again, but at the same time, you know, the American Football Coaches Association, the trade organization that

That represents the will of the coaches.

You know, they just endorsed 24 as well.

There definitely are coaches in the SEC that wanted to push to 24.

But it's also a big jump.

And there's a lot of people in that room who aren't excited about the idea of pushing the number to that many.

Yeah, I mean, I think that you're absolutely right, right?

Like, I think that there's a level of diminishing marginal return, especially for ESPN, if they were to go to 24, because

You talk about it, the idea of bowl games being cannibalized is certainly one dynamic to take into account.

The other thing too, and this is sort of the like giant existential dynamic, is that if we go to 24, I mean, we'd be adding a whole other round of the college football playoff.

We'd be adding a whole bunch of games in what is now the first round, which would become the second round.

And

there starts to become issues legitimately with scheduling and with trying to make these things happen and not go up against the NFL.

You know, one of the things that the AFCA came out with was that, yes, we want to have a 2014 playoff, but we also want the season to be over by the second week of January.

Well, the only way to make that happen would be to play games directly up against NFL games, including some playoff games in some cases.

and obviously that is a huge loser for television networks that that's not something that they're excited about we've seen even just in the first round as is uh you know espn has sold off the two games every year that go up against nfl regular season games on a saturday and those games which are broadcast on tnt get about 40 of the viewership of the other games and that's not just the case of the group of five game that's also texas clemson last year for example so