The FBS postseason has historically been the only NCAA postseason event to operate outside the purview of the NCAA, largely because the concept of the football postseason is older than the NCAA itself.
However, that could soon change.
At the Collegiate Commissioners Association meetings this week in Chicago, FCS leaders heard a pitch from the private equity firm Sequence Equity on removing that division's postseason from NCAA control and into a new organization, similar to the College Football Playoff.
While details at this time are scarce, the theory is simple. From Hero Sports:
“We lose money,” said one sitting athletic director whose program has made multiple playoff runs in the past decade. “It’s a great product and tremendously undervalued. Surely there has to be another way. I think every athletic director, president, and commissioner will listen if something like this is presented.”
According to Front Office Sports, Sequence would own a minority stake and inject tens of millions of dollars into the venture, and the FCS conferences would retain the majority interest.
It would remain to be seen if the format changes under a new ownership. Presently, 11 of the 13 FCS conferences will send their champions (the Ivy League will participate for the first time this season; the SWAC and MEAC champs meet in the Celebration Bowl) to a 24-team bracket, beginning Nov. 29 and concluding Jan. 5, 2026 at Nashville's FirstBank Stadium. The FBS does not guarantee access to every conference in its format, so there's no guarantee an FCS event would do the same.
What the FCS playoffs would be worth on the open market remains to be seen, but we have recent evidence of the NCAA failing to extract the proper value for the championship events it controls. A 2021 report found that the NCAA prioritized the Division I men's basketball tournament at the expense of every other sport. At the time, ESPN paid $34 million annually for the rights to 29 non-men's basketball NCAA postseason events, but an independent report found that the women's basketball tournament alone should have been worth at least $81 million per year. Last year, the NCAA sold the rights to 40 championships to ESPN for $110 million per year, with women's basketball an estimated $65 million of that.
If the NCAA undervalued the rights to women's basketball, it stands to reason it could have undervalued FCS football similarly. Last season's FCS national championship, airing unopposed on a Friday night, drew 2.41 million viewers, the most since the 2019 season.
Obviously, getting FCS football out from under that contract, which runs through the 2031 football season, would be a long conversation. That's why there are no imminent plans to make a CFP for the FCS; the earliest it would begin would be the 2027 season.