Like it or not, the College Football Playoff is expected to expand to 24 teams beginning with the 2027 season.
Once that happens, Fox college football analyst Joel Klatt expects the SEC and Big Ten to strike a non-conference scheduling agreement, to be announced soon after CFP expansion becomes official.
"There are scheduling agreements that are in place once this thing expands officially," Klatt told KTCK-FM 96.7 The Ticket in Dallas on Wednesday. "The next thing that will happen almost immediately is we're going to get scheduling agreements between the SEC and the Big Ten -- top-end matchups, mid-tier matchups, low-end matchups -- and we're going to be expanding the valuable matchups in the non-conference, far surpassing what we have now."
Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti pledged his league would commit to a minimum of 10 Power 4 games if conjunction with the field expanding to 24. “We need to play more good games. I think we’ve been really clear about that. We think that the season can start way better than it does. We’re committed to that. If we get to a 24-team Playoff, you are going to see many more competitive games scheduled," he said earlier this month. The Big Ten is the only conference that does not require 10 Power 4 opponents; Indiana, Nebraska, Penn State, USC, and Washington did not play a team from the ACC, SEC, Big 12 or Notre Dame this season.
Though it's expected ESPN will retain control of the Playoff once it expands to 24, Fox has openly pushed for a 24-team CFP as a means to creating better non-conference inventory. "One of the big knocks against college football is the first three weeks. It's actually hard to find great games," Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks said in April. "If you don't get penalized for playing those big non-conference games early and there's a bigger pool of teams that can get into a (24-team) playoff, the schedule gets better in September because you won't be penalized for playing great games." The Big Ten's only appearance among the 10 most-watched games through the first quarter of the season were Ohio State's trip to Texas (which aired on ABC), Wisconsin's neutral site game with Notre Dame (an Irish home game, and thus part of Notre Dame's NBC contract), and Michigan's home game with Oklahoma, which aired on Fox.
In an SEC-Big Ten challenge, hypothetically eight SEC home games would air on ESPN's family of networks, two of the eight Big Ten home games would go to CBS and NBC, while the rest would air on Fox, Fox Sports 1, or BTN, of which Fox owns 61 percent.
Though competitors on the field, the SEC and Big Ten are partners in governorship over the College Football Playoff. Those two conferences, and only those two, hold veto power over the CFP's format through its current contract (running through the 2031 season), and a scheduling alliance would serve an additional purpose beyond driving early-season viewership and ticket sales. If they were to play exclusively against one another, the SEC and Big Ten would box the ACC and Big 12 out of opportunities to play the 34 schools in the two conferences and, thus, make it more difficult for ACC and Big 12 teams to pick up bids to the 24-team event.