College football leaders announced plans for expansion of the College Football Playoff from 12 to 24 teams for the 2027 season.
This comes shortly after the CFP expanded from 4 to 12 teams in 2024. It’s likely that the college football season will begin a week earlier, conference championship games will be eliminated, and there will be one more week of CFP games. Will the expanded CFP make fans more interested in the postseason? Less interested in the regular season? More interested in both? The impact is worth considering because college football is an outlier as the one major sport where interest peaks during its regular season.
Sports Poll™ asks fans which sport they are most interested in right now.
Preferences shift throughout the year, but interest for a sport typically builds during the season before spiking in the postseason. College basketball is the most extreme where interest surges during March Madness. Interest in college football, on the other hand, is steady throughout the regular season before a postseason dip. The decline has been less pronounced since the CFP expanded in 2024, but the sport still loses momentum after the regular season.
There are two ways to think about an expanded playoff.
One view is that the current college football postseason doesn’t keep enough fans engaged. It faces competition from the holidays and other sports. There are also only a limited number of teams involved and large gaps in time between games (although there are more teams and shorter gaps since 2024). The hope would be that an expanded playoff would keep fans engaged with more meaningful games in December and January.
Another view is that interest trails off in the postseason only because college football does such a great job at keeping fans engaged during its regular season. An October game between Tennessee and Alabama is compelling because the loser may not have a shot at a national championship. With 24 playoff slots available, those early season games matter less. Fans may still tune in for marquee matchups, but the sport could lose some of what makes it unique with its regular season.
Reach out to us if you’d like more information on how this breaks out by demographics or for any of the 88 sports we track on Sports Poll.
Sports Poll by SSRS™ is conducted continuously throughout the year and includes a nationally representative sample of more than 24,000 Americans each year.
