The SEC takeover of the 2012 Bowl Championship Series title game – LSU vs. Alabama – led directly to the implementation of the College Football Playoff. The waves of conference realignment from 2010-14 tied directly to the desire to sweeten upcoming or existing television contracts. When congressional scrutiny found the Bowl Alliance in the late 1990s, the BCS was created for the 1998 season.

Every recent seismic shift in college athletics can be tied to an obvious trigger.

After interviews with a dozen officials around college athletics, it’s highly likely we’re amid another pivotal moment in the sport. The inevitable financial strain that will accompany the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to help trigger an expansion of the College Football Playoff.

While momentum had been building toward expansion – a WatchStadium.com poll showed 88 percent of athletic directors were in favor – the ability to create a robust new revenue steam for schools amid tight fiscal times has the sport’s powerbrokers forecasting an expanded playoff as a likely reverberation from COVID-19.

“I think we were moving in that direction anyway,” said a conference commissioner. “Could it be accelerated by something like this? It’s a good point. Revenue is going to be an issue. It’s not on the front burner yet, but it’s a legitimate question.”

Multiple college sports officials mentioned they’ve been so locked in on taking care of their own campuses and leagues – including planning financial contingencies – that any conversation about the CFP’s future appears months away.

CFP executive director Bill Hancock stressed no decisions are imminent, but it’s also notable that he didn’t shoot down the notion. “People can speculate anything about this, but no one knows exactly what will happen,” Hancock told Yahoo Sports. “It’s fun for people to speculate, but no one can see the future for sure.”

Detailed view of the 2020 College Football Playoff National Championship logo at midfield at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. (Kirby Lee-USAT Sports) More

When would playoff expansion happen?

We’re halfway through ESPN’s 12-year television deal to broadcast the CFP. It’s difficult to find officials around the sport who see the format remaining for the final six seasons.

That said, we won’t see a reformatted playoff for at least two more college football seasons. The 2020 season — whatever that comes to look like — is certainly not going to be the place where we see a different postseason format. Those familiar with the system say that putting changes in place for the 2021 season would be virtually impossible.

So the earliest an expansion could happen would be following the 2022 season, which means that leagues and programs wouldn’t get a bigger paycheck until the spring of 2023. Hopefully by then, COVID-19 is a distant memory and some normalcy has returned to the landscape.

But even the most optimistic financial projections come with significant fallout, as donations, ticket sales and overall revenue will project to be less than recent years.

How much more could it be worth?

This is likely the thorniest question. There are so many variables that come into play here that broadly projecting a number can be nothing more than educated guesses off back-of-the-napkin math.

As the playoff works currently, there’s an average of nearly $470 million paid out annually to the conferences in the postseason bowl bundle. (There are variances here, because of the rotating New Year’s Six bowls.)

For the Power Five leagues, a ballpark average payout each season is nearly $70 million. But using $70 million as a baseline, that means each program in a Power Five league gets more than $5.5 million annually from the CFP.

How much could those numbers increase?

Predictions are fluid because of the myriad factors that come into play here. With six years left on the ESPN deal, there’s unlikely to be outside leverage to inflate the deal. Also, ESPN is going into its most profitable years of the deal, as is common on the backend of long contracts. (That would theoretically lessen its motivation to tear it up to pay exponentially more.)

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