Nick Saban speaks truth on CFP expansion: ‘There’s not 24 teams’ that can win a national title, but money wins
The impending expansion of the college football playoff has led to fans sounding off on the decision to move from 12 to 24 teams after only three years after adding eight teams to the current format.
There have certainly been questions as to why it was so important from a timing standpoint to make the drastic move in adding 12 teams in such a short period of time, as ESPN and the CFP finalize their new television rights agreement over the next few weeks.
This page may contain affiliate links to legal sports betting partners. If you sign up or place a wager, FOX News may be compensated. This content was created by a team that works independently from the FOX newsroom.
While most of it has centered around the need to give more college football teams the opportunity at competing for a national championship, and providing conferences with justification for their spending to be competitive, a majority of fans have made it clear that making this type of leap is not worth the hassle that comes with it.
Nick Saban doesn’t hold back on CFP expansion move
But, the most obvious argument comes down to the fact that there are not 24 teams in college football worthy enough of winning a national championship, especially in this era of the sport with teams spending upwards of $45 million to piece together a roster.
The real reason is somewhere in the middle between justifying that amount of money spent on contending for a title and what each school is doing to compete on a yearly basis with no guaranteed return on investment.
"Too many. There’s not 24 teams in the country that can win a National Championship," Nick Saban told the Kelce brothers on the New Heights podcast. "So, what is the reason to actually do it? It’s about the money. What you’re giving up, which I hate to see, the SEC Championship Game, playing in the SEC Championship was a big thing for our players, it was a big thing to our fans. It was a tradition and it was a great venue.
"I mean, there’s only two teams who can play in a National Championship, but more teams can play in those kind of championship games. There’s a lot of pride in winning the conference championship."
ESPN College GameDay analyst Nick Saban talks during the show on the lawn of Ayres Hall at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tenn., on Sept. 26, 2026. (Getty Images)
We could have just gone with sixteen teams, and not the drastic leap to 24
Losing out on conference title games, which is coming, was one of the caveats that committee members seemingly had to agree on in this impending move.
Now, even if some years they are meaningless when it comes to CFP rankings, the tradition that comes with the first weekend of December is lost with expanding once again.
Saban made a point that playing teams like Florida or Georgia while both ranked within the Top-5 of the country at the time added to the intrigue.
Nick Saban, former head football coach at the University of Alabama, arrives for testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., on June 3, 2026. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
But, it was the former Alabama coach that made one of the strongest points of the entire argument, and it centers around how many games college football players will now be asked to play on a yearly basis if they are lucky enough to make a playoff run.
"We’re gonna give that up to have an extra game where the 24th team is going to play the ninth best team," Nick Saban continued. "If we just put the right 12 teams in and didn’t go through all the political BS that we went through so we can have a 12-team Playoff, and end up putting a couple of teams in that shouldn’t be in, and some teams that should’ve been in that didn’t get in should have gotten in, that was a good tournament.
"Maybe you go to sixteen if you want to include some other people. But, 24 is a lot. It's too many games for college football players to play. We played 15 games three times, and I thought that was too many games for college players to play."
Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban looks on before the SEC Championship game against the Georgia Bulldogs at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Dec. 2, 2023. (John David Mercer/USA TODAY Sports)
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Saban has a solid point, especially when those teams who compete in a conference title game then will not play another game for nearly a month.
We might not agree with the former Alabama coach on a lot of things, but Saban speaking truth into the downside of expansion is something a lot of fans will rightfully get behind.
Trey Wallace is the Sr. College Sports Reporter for OutKick.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.