On Tuesday, Front Office Sports’s Ryan Glasspiegel opened his Tuned In panel with John Fanta and Josh Pate by asking Pate for his thoughts on an expanded College Football Playoff.
“Hate it,” Pate, who now hosts a weekly college football show on ESPN, said. “Viscerally hate it.”
Let’s back up.
Elsewhere Tuesday, Ross Dellenger reported that ESPN and the College Football Playoff are “close” to a deal on an expanded 24-team field. Pate, however, shouted his opposition from the rooftops at the Front Office Sports conference in New York City.
Josh Pate says College Football Playoff expansion is happening because the sport’s leaders believe fans will just watch anyway.
Presented by @SpectrumBiz https://t.co/iKRvJ6C92n
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) October 13, 2026
Pate laid out that the transfer portal and NIL may have caused expanding to a 12-team playoff, which he also opposed, to retroactively seem like the right decision. But the regular season — “the most valuable commodity that college football has” — has been subsequently harmed, as urgency is diluted when top contenders clash in the regular season in favor of “a safety net” and “manufactured urgency on games featuring teams playing for a 22-seed.”
Later, Pate delved even deeper into his personal gripes with the notion of a 24-team playoff.
“When you went from BCS to four-team, there was supermajority public support behind it. When you went from four to 12, there was supermajority public support behind it. And one of the most disingenuous things, maybe even just one of the flat-out most ignorant approaches that I’ve seen over the past year is — I hesitate to call them leaders, but the movers in college football even going so far as to acknowledge publicly, ‘Well, we know that fan sentiment is against this.’
“But it’s almost like, ‘Well, you’ll watch anyway. You’ll take what we give you anyway. But in the aggregate, we’ve really screwed this up nine ways from Sunday. We need a bailout. We’ve gotta create revenue somewhere, so we’re gonna call it an expanded playoff. Really, what it is is it’s an ATM to bail out very bad decision-making from, and I use this term loosely, leadership in college football.”
As we’ve seen with college football in recent years — or with the NFL and its increasing international slate — financial incentives often supersede what’s best for the health of the sport.
Unfortunately, even if Pate and college football fans hate it, people will still watch an expanded College Football Playoff, even if begrudgingly, validating the decision-makers in college football in taking viewership for granted in spite of a diluted product.
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