College football just detonated its postseason. The College Football Playoff will expand from 12 to 24 teams beginning with the 2027 season — and the Power Four conference championship games are gone.

The money behind it is enormous: Yahoo Sports reported the CFP and ESPN agreed to a five-year, $1.7 billion deal to fund the expanded field. The 12-team format, which only debuted in 2024, will run just three seasons before being doubled.

The structural fallout is massive. Eliminating conference title games ends a three-decade era in which championship weekend ranked among the sport's marquee events. Per The Guardian, five teams will auto-qualify, with the rest of the 24-team field selected by a panel. CBS Sports notes the change ripples into everything from conference race stakes to the Heisman calendar.

Reaction is predictably split. The format guarantees more teams meaningful November football and more postseason inventory for TV — but it also means a sport that has reinvented its postseason three times in under 15 years is tearing up the blueprint again before the current one even settled.