Tim Brando Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Syndication: Shreveport Times/The Times
By Sam Neumann on

Tim Brando has been saying college football’s regular season is overrated since before it was useful for Fox Sports to say so.

“I’ve been saying this since I worked at ESPN and CBS Sports,” Brando posted on X Tuesday. “This greatest regular season crap has been a myth for years!”

The post came in response to news that the American Football Coaches Association voted last week to support a 24-team playoff format that would eliminate conference championship games. Brando also called himself and Clay Travis “house boys” for Fox Sports in the minds of critics — an acknowledgment, however sardonic, that the network’s fingerprints are all over this push.

The fingerprints are not hard to find.

Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks publicly endorsed the 24-team format in April during a Sports Business Journal conference. Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti has been floating the idea of expanding to 24 or 28 teams since last summer. Fox’s lead analyst, Joel Klatt, has spent the better part of this playoff cycle criticizing ESPN’s exclusive CFP deal, calling it bad for the sport, and has said he would “do anything” to call a playoff game.

The financial stakes explain a lot. ESPN’s current deal gives it exclusive broadcast rights to every CFP game, in any format, for up to 14 teams. Every team added beyond that threshold means new inventory that has to go to market, and Fox would seemingly be among the first in line to bid on it. A 24-team bracket adds roughly 12 additional games to a network that currently has no college football footprint after conference championship weekend.

On the other side, ESPN executives have privately dismissed the 24-team format, per Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, aligning with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who has been firm in his preference for 16 teams and has no interest in eliminating conference championship games, which generate around $80 million annually for the SEC alone. The ACC and Big 12 have recently come around to supporting 24 teams, leaving the SEC as the lone holdout among the power four conferences.

The “greatest regular season” argument — the one Brando is swinging at — is the SEC and ESPN’s primary line of defense. It is the idea that college football’s regular season derives its value from scarcity, that every game matters because only a handful of teams make the playoff, and that expanding the field dilutes that. It is an argument ESPN’s Kevin Clark made forcefully on The Paul Finebaum Show this week, calling a 24-team playoff a “disgrace” and accusing CFP leadership of not actually liking the sport they are running.

“College football has the best regular season in sports,” Clark said. “And every decision, every idea I’ve seen about playoff expansion seems like it’s come from people who don’t like college football.”

Brando’s counter is that the regular-season mythology has always been overstated, that the old system produced its own meaningless games, its own foregone conclusions, and a postseason so small and so political that it drove more resentment than reverence. He is not alone in that view, given that Klatt himself made a version of it when defending the 12-team expansion last season, pointing out that the old four-team model had “reduced the definition of success to only four teams” and was “awful for the sport.”

The argument, in other words, is not just Brando’s. It’s the coordinated position of many prominent voices at Fox Sports — from Shanks in the executive suite to Klatt in the booth — and Brando is simply one of the few willing to say out loud what the network’s financial interests make obvious.

Whether any of it moves the needle depends almost entirely on whether the SEC holds. If enough SEC coaches begin pressuring Sankey — and the AFCA’s board includes SEC members like Oklahoma’s Brent Venables and Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea — that calculus may very well shift. For now, the CFP is expected to remain at 12 teams for the 2026-27 season. The fight over what comes next is very much alive, and Fox is making sure everyone knows where it stands.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann