The College Football Playoff will officially expand from 12 teams to 24 for the 2027 season.
And while Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian has “bigger fish to fry” right now — which he informed the press of during a media availability on Monday — he did in part address the expansion when asked about it.
His official position on the matter is one he says remains in the air as of now, but he does hope the bigger CFP bracket will encourage teams to schedule harder nonconference games.
“We should be promoting more big games at the beginning of the season, and hopefully that’s what the 24-team playoff does,” Sarkisian said. “I don’t want college football to be ‘Hey, just wait until November, December, January (for tight matchups), and September and October to look like exhibition games.”
Sarkisian has long believed teams should schedule difficult nonconference matchups, as evidenced by the Longhorns’ 2025 and 2026 battles against Ohio State. Texas is also set to face Michigan early next season and Notre Dame in 2028.
Those games, Sarkisian argues, are the ones fans want to brave the Texas September heat for. He believes that creating schedules strategically aimed at making a team’s path to the CFP easier lowers the quality of college football at large.
Sarkisian’s belief in the importance of opponent quality isn’t limited to nonconference games either. As someone whose team competes in the Southeastern Conference, which is known for the across-the-board strength of its members, he hopes the CFP selection committee also evaluates how tough each team’s conference schedule is.
Statistics, he argues, aren’t the best way to measure how strong each team actually is.
“Our stats might not look as good,” Sarkisian said. “We’re playing a lot better opponents. We could schedule some of (those) other teams. We never will at Texas. We could, and we could inflate stats and go for a bunch of yards and run for a bunch of yards.”
At the end of the day, though, Sarkisian said he thinks that 5 1/2 sacks against Tennessee on the road is better than getting four sacks against a school people couldn’t locate on a map. It’s a fairly bold stance, but it’s the one Sarkisian has repeatedly taken when it comes to discussing who gets selected for the CFP.
For now, Texas’ main goal is making this year’s 12-team CFP slate. With two losses and three conference games left to play, this will be no small feat for the Longhorns.
This upcoming weekend, they will take the field at Tiger Stadium and face a Louisiana State University team in front of a crowd of over 102,000 fans. The Tigers have racked up three losses so far this season, and a win against the No. 8 Longhorns would help them make a stronger case for getting into the CFP despite their blemished record.
The matchups Texas and LSU have conceded this year are part of the reason Sarkisian believes the selection committee must do a better job of considering strength of schedule when making its decisions.
“Hopefully we’re able to keep some of the bigger games on our schedule because I know our players want that, our fans want that, we want that,” he said.
