Ahead of Saturday’s Heisman Trophy ceremony: Miami quarterback Cam Ward talked about how many teams he thought should be there College Football Playoffs. In his opinion, the “sweet spot” is between 16 and 24 teams.

Ward played in a 24-team playoff early in his career. He started at Incarnated Word before the transfer Washington stateand the Cardinals made it to the second round before losing Sam Houston State.

After two years at Wazzu, Ward took his talents to Miami, which narrowly missed out on making the CFP this year. He previously spoke about the decision to leave the Hurricanes out of the 12-team field, and on Saturday he said he would like the group to look more like what he has seen at the FCS level.

This year marks the first 12-team College Football Playoff after a decade of a four-team format. Under the new model, the five highest-ranked conference champions enter the field and the four highest-ranked receive byes. The next seven highest-ranked teams from there round out the whole thing.

However, there were rumors in the spring of further expansion when the current CFP contract expires in 2026. The 10 conferences and Notre Dame agreed a new contractwhich potentially signaled a 14-team model – the five highest-ranked conference champions and the next nine highest-ranked teams.

However, there were several things to clarify with the new agreement that went beyond the number of teams in the field. One of those was media rights, and ESPN is upping its contract with the CFP. The other involved a new revenue model.

Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported that the Big Ten and the SEC were propose a model This could give them a bigger piece of the pie. The Big Ten and SEC would each receive 29% of the base revenue, while the Big 12 and ACC would receive 17.1% and 14.7%, respectively. This leaves 9% for the G5 conferences, 1% for Notre Dame and less than 1% for UConn, Oregon State And Washington state.

ESPN’s Heather Dinich He also said there were questions about the position of the Group 5 conferences in the negotiations. However, they made one thing clear. They didn’t want to be left out.

“It’s like the Godfather’s offer that you can’t refuse.” a G5 sports director said to Dinich at the time.