The College Football Playoff is coming to TNT.
Warner Brothers Discovery announced Wednesday that ESPN and TNT Sports agreed to a five-year deal that will allow TNT Sports to sublicense CFP games. Two first-round games will air on TNT Sports during the 2024 and 2025 campaigns, and the network will then add two quarterfinal games each year from the 2026 through 2028 seasons.
“It is exciting to add TNT Sports, another highly respected broadcaster, to the College Football Playoff family,” CFP executive director Bill Hancock said. “Sports fans across the country are intimately familiar with their work across a wide variety of sports properties over the past two decades, and we look forward to seeing what new and innovative ideas they bring to the promotion and delivery of these games.”
As part of the agreement, ESPN will air the other CFP games and the national title contest on its own networks.
This comes as the CFP is expanding.
It started in the 2014 season as a four-team system and continued that way through the 2023 campaign. However, the college football landscape has drastically shifted since the start of the CFP thanks to conference expansion that has centralized many of the nation’s top programs, and the playoff system is expanding as the changes continue.
The upcoming season will be the first with a 12-team format, which will feature five auto bids for the conference champions of the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC and the highest-ranked Group of Five conference champion, as well as seven at-large bids.
However, that system is only guaranteed to be in place for the 2024 and 2025 seasons.
ESPN’s Heather Dinich and Pete Thamel reported in March that the expectation is the playoff will expand to 14 teams starting with the 2026 campaign.
It is a time of constant change in the sport, but TNT Sports will be there to air the race for the championship in the coming years.
