NCAA football playoffs kick off: YF Sports Report

The 2024-25 season marks the first time the NCAA is expanding the College Football Playoff from a four-team bracket to 12 teams. The tournament began earlier this week and will run through late January. This week on Yahoo Finance Sports Report, host Joe Pompliano dives deep into everything fans and investors need to know about the new College Football Playoff format and why it’s going to be such a financial success for anyone who has their hands in its pot. Pompliano says it’s simple as to why this is a success: there are more games. “If you think about the old college football playoff system, there were really only a handful of games that mattered because there were only four teams, two rounds of games - a handful of games,” Pompliano says. “But now there's 11 games with national championship implications that has allowed the College Football Playoff [Selection] Committee to go negotiate a larger deal with ESPN. In fact, they were able to secure a $7.8 billion contract over six years with ESPN worth $1.3 billion annually. This deal was so large and there were so many games that ESPN actually ended up sublicensing a couple of these games to TNT for $25 million each.” This is a massive amount of money and doesn’t even include potential ticket revenue from each of these games and sponsorship deals. Plus, Olympic gold medalist and Boston Fleet captain Hilary Knight drops by the show to discuss the growth of the PWHL as the league begins its sophomore season. Yahoo Finance Sports Report with Joe Pompliano, a vodcast brought to you by Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports, looks beyond the latest sports business headlines, analyzes all the need-to-know news - the teams, trades, and billion dollar deals - so you and your portfolio will win BIG. Yahoo Finance Sports Report is developed and produced by Lauren Pokedoff.