Nick Saban just said what every college football fan already knows: the College Football Playoff's rush to expand from 12 to 24 teams has nothing to do with crowning a champion and everything to do with cash.
The former Alabama coach told the Kelce brothers on the New Heights podcast that the move defies competitive logic. "Too many. There's not 24 teams in the country that can win a National Championship," Saban said. "So, what is the reason to actually do it? It's about the money."
The timing tells the whole story. ESPN and the CFP are finalizing a new television rights agreement over the next few weeks, according to Fox News. The drastic leap to 24 teams — coming only three years after the initial expansion to 12 — isn't about giving more programs a shot at a trophy. It's about justifying the billions in media rights and the upward of $45 million some schools now spend just to assemble a roster. Follow the money, and the motive is obvious.
Saban spelled out what gets sacrificed. "What you're giving up, which I hate to see, the SEC Championship Game, playing in the SEC Championship was a big thing for our players, it was a big thing to our fans. It was a tradition and it was a great venue." Conference title games — the first weekend in December, the pride of winning your league — are being auctioned off so the 24th-best team can play the ninth-best team in a game nobody asked for.
Saban also pointed to the political maneuvering that drives selection. "If we just put the right 12 teams in and didn't go through all the political BS that we went through," he said, trailing off. The committee process, already suspect, will only get worse with more slots to haggle over.
Meanwhile, the prediction markets are already telling a different story than the committee. Sports Illustrated reported that Kalshi's National Championship market disagrees with CFP rankings across the board. Utah sits at No. 3 in the committee's rankings but carries just a 2% chance on Kalshi. Notre Dame, ranked No. 11 by the committee, holds the third-highest price on the board at 13%. The committee questions Notre Dame's schedule strength; the market doesn't care. Money speaks its own language.
The same concentration of power that has captured every American institution — media conglomerates dictating terms, administrators chasing revenue at the expense of tradition, players treated as inventory in a longer season — has now fully consumed college sports. The people running it don't care about competition; they care about contracts. A 16-team field would have preserved some competitive integrity. Instead, the system leapt straight to 24.
The open question is whether fans will keep watching a product that keeps selling them out.
