Tony Petitti dismisses ‘polls’ suggesting fan backlash to 24-team CFP
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Surveys of college football fans have made one thing abundantly clear: Support for a 24-team College Football Playoff is lacking.
A recent social media poll by On3 showed very few people are excited about potential expansion to 24 teams. The April poll saw 79 percent of respondents say they prefer the College Football Playoff remain at 12 teams or expand to 16 teams. Just nine percent of all respondents wanted the field bumped to 24.
College Football Playoff expansion
— On3 (@On3) April 21, 2026
But that level of wholesale discontent, albeit from a non-scientific survey, hasn’t done much to dissuade Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti from throwing the full weight of his support behind a 24-team playoff. When asked about fan backlash to the 24-team format during Big Ten Media Days on Tuesday, Petitti dismissed the seeming displeasure.
“I know there’s things out there we get, ‘Oh, this fan poll said this, this poll said that.’ I’m really confident that we’ll fill our stadiums and we’ll have really large audiences for these games,” Petitti said.
Re: 24-team CFP backlash, Petitti says, “I know there’s things out there, we get ‘Oh, this fan poll said this, this poll said that.’ I’m really confident that we’ll fill our stadiums and we’ll have really large audiences for these games.”
— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) July 28, 2026
Petitti has been one of the most outspoken advocates for a 24-team playoff in all of college football. His counterpart at the SEC, Greg Sankey, has yet to buy in. Any change to the College Football Playoff format will require alignment from the two top conferences in the country.
Of course, the motives behind expansion largely come down to the two things Petitti mentioned in his answer: Filling stadiums and, more importantly, attracting large television audiences.
Those television audiences get at the cold war brewing between Fox and ESPN, and their proxies at the Big Ten and SEC, respectively. ESPN currently holds exclusive television rights to the 12-team College Football Playoff and, per prior reports, would retain exclusive rights under any format up to 14 teams. Expansion beyond 14 would bring new inventory to market, allowing a network like Fox to get a piece of the pie. Fox would like to get in the game, and benefit from the large audiences associated with postseason college football, while ESPN would like to protect the value of the playoff inventory it currently pays $1.3 billion per year for.
In April, Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks publicly endorsed a 24-team format, saying it would create more meaningful games during the regular season. Days later, reports surfaced that ESPN executives have “privately dismissed” expanding to 24 teams.
As for Petitti’s insistence that fans will tune in, he’s probably right, at least to a degree. First-round College Football Playoff games in the 12-team format have performed quite well, aside from those that have aired head-to-head with NFL games at the same time. It’s likely that a first-round playoff game under a 24-team format would outdraw a non-playoff game like the Gator Bowl.
But whether fans will actually enjoy the product more is a different question entirely. As it stands, fans have pretty emphatically denounced expansion to 24 teams. But in the business of college sports, fan sentiment only goes so far.
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