Pate's claim is not that 24 teams would be bad television. His claim is that 24 teams would quietly kill the exact thing that makes the sport worth watching in September and October: the pucker factor.

That's the argument he built the whole segment around, and he built it on purpose, before the College Football Playoff Management Committee meets Monday to discuss expansion beyond the current 12-team format.

Context matters here. Pate reported rumblings of a possible 20-team model with conference play-in games, but the public fight, as he laid it out, is between the SEC's preferred 16 and a Big Ten-backed push toward 24. Greg Sankey's stance, per Pate, has been to gather information rather than draw a hard line. Monday's meeting is where that information starts arriving.

The case: 12 is the ceiling, not a waypoint

Pate conceded something first, which is worth noting before the argument gets sharp. He admitted he pushed back on expansion to 12 originally and has come around on it, given Portal and NIL reshaping the sport's parity. That concession is what makes his next line land. “It's impossible for me to come around on 24 because you've reached the saturation point.”

The mechanism he's describing is simple enough to verify on any given Saturday. Watch Texas play Texas A&M late in a season under a 12-team model: the winner is likely in, the loser is likely out. That's the trigger. The consequence is a stomach-level urgency you can feel through a television. Now run that same game through a 24-team frame. Both teams have a playoff safety net. The consequence changes: nothing but seeding is on the table. Pate's phrase for it — the loser's not sure and the winner's not sure, and that not-sure feeling is inventory the sport pays out one bank at a time.

His sharpest version of the trade came wrapped in specific programs. “Minnesota and Nebraska are never going to whiff a national championship. Texas may, Georgia may. And so we we're removing meaning from the games featuring the teams capable of winning it all to manufacture meaning on games featuring teams incapable of winning at all.”

That's not a knock on Minnesota or Nebraska. It's Pate crediting both sides of the ledger before he swings the sword: expansion adds stakes to games between flawed teams and removes stakes from games between the sport's best rosters. You don't get the first without paying for it with the second. That's the exchange rate nobody wants to say out loud.

He applied the same logic to the exclusion argument that expansion proponents lean on hardest — the idea that any format capable of leaving out a potential title team is too small. Pate's answer, stated plainly on the show, is that a field that leaves a flawed-but-talented team on the outside looking in is the correct size, not a broken one. He pointed to Notre Dame and Texas getting left out last year as proof the current cut line is doing its job, not failing at it.

The complication buried in the sound bites

Here's the honest counter: Pate's strongest evidence against 24 isn't a stat. It's Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti's own words, and Pate spent a large chunk of the segment playing them back.

Petitti's comparison to MLB's playoff structure drew the sharpest response of the show. “I don't think you do understand the difference because if you understand the difference, then you understand that is a playoff sport and they play 162 regular season games that are largely irrelevant.” The complication is real, though: coaches and administrators — the people whose job security is actually on the line — are largely aligned behind 24. Pate doesn't dispute that alignment exists. He disputes that it should carry the weight it's currently carrying. “One of the more shocking headlines of the modern era is that coaches and ads whose very job security relies on making the playoff are all of a sudden fully on board with expanding the playoff to 24 teams.” If Pate is wrong here, it's because that alignment — plus the revenue case — simply outweighs public sentiment in the room Monday. That's the scenario where his prediction fails: value projections win, fan pushback gets treated as noise, and the sport gets sold a bigger tent whether the customer asked for one or not.

The moment Pate returned to most pointedly was Petitti dismissing fan polling on the record. “I'll translate for you. Piss on what you think. You'll take what we give you and you'll like it. That's essentially the attitude in the room.” Pate framed the sport's revenue as fan-driven at its root, which is exactly why he found that dismissal so galling.

The close

Pate isn't predicting doom. He's predicting a fight, and he thinks the SEC and Big Ten not being aligned means nothing is settled by Monday's meeting. “In fact, it's very possible we just stay at 12. And what a radical concept to adopt a new playoff format and wait more than two years to expand it.”

The sport doesn't owe anybody 24 teams just because 24 sounds bigger than 12. Watch the full breakdown of the Petitti sound bites in the embed above, then decide for yourself whether the room in Chicago was listening to fans or just talking past them.