Alabama Crimson Tide

Biggest takeaways from the College Football Playoff's new schedule

Published Nov. 15, 2016 3:50 p.m. ET

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Give the College Football Playoff folks credit. Unlike their predecessor the BCS, the powers-that-be are willing to accept negative feedback — and to actually do something about it.

After a failed one-year experiment that saw a 36 percent drop in TV ratings and mass public backlash, the CFP announced Thursday it will no longer try to reinvent the national tradition that is New Year’s Eve. Semifinal games over the remaining 10 years of its contract will either be played on Saturdays or a holiday, which still includes three Dec. 31 doubleheaders and three Jan. 1 Rose and Sugar semis but shifts four other years’ games to as early as Dec. 27.

Publicly, executive director Bill Hancock spent the first week of January spinning those embarrassing TV numbers (“One year does not make a trend,” he said roughly a billion times), but privately, I’m told, discussions about changes began in earnest as soon as the day of the Alabama-Clemson title game. It’s a given that ESPN, with its $7.3 billion investment, wanted to try different dates — in fact, it had proposed a year earlier moving the 2015 semis to Jan. 2 — but the commissioners recognized the problem went beyond TV ratings. They did not want to alienate fans so early in the new system’s life.

Alabama's 38-0 domination of Michigan State ended late on New Year's Eve, not long before the ball was set to drop on the East Coast. (Richard W. Rodriguez/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/TNS via Getty Images)

After scouring the new schedule, here are my biggest takeaways:

— The Big Ten, Pac-12, SEC and Big 12 got their way. All parties were insistent that their respective conference bowls, the Rose and Sugar, would not surrender their coveted New Year’s Day timeslots for the betterment of the playoff. This model is simply a more sensible workaround than the original plan.

It will be interesting to see the effect on the Jan. 1 bowls when the semis are played several days in advance. As the AP’s Ralph Russo tweeted, it will be like “Pearl Jam as an opening act.” There’s no question last year’s Fiesta (Ohio State-Notre Dame), Citrus (Michigan-Florida), Outback (Northwestern-Tennessee), Rose (Iowa-Stanford) and Sugar (Ole Miss-Oklahoma State) bowls had a next-day hangover feel, and the ratings reflected it.

That being said, waking up and watching college football on New Year’s Day is a long-entrenched tradition, and it may be that putting some space in between the two events gives fans time to get their second wind and feed their football appetite.

— By placing some years’ semis on the Saturday before New Year’s but remaining locked in to Mondays for the championship, the gap between rounds will get considerably longer in some instances. In 2019-20, for example, the semis are now slated for Dec. 28. The championship game in New Orleans is not until 16 days later, on Jan. 13.

The 4 p.m. ET start time for the Clemson-Oklahoma Orange Bowl semifinal meant many people across the country were still at work for some or all of the game. (Al Diaz/Miami Herald/TNS via Getty Images)

Coaches of the participating teams will be thrilled about this. Two years ago, both Ohio State’s Urban Meyer and Oregon’s Mark Helfrich described the turnaround as brutal, particularly given it coincides with most schools’ start to the second semester and because teams fly out to the championship site three days early. Interest-wise may be a different story; that’s a whole lot of time for college football to be off the radar, particularly during the NFL playoffs.

Of course, just the way they made this change, the commissioners could well move some of those future title games a week earlier.

— The press release announcing the change was for many the first time noticing that the semifinal bowl sites in 2021, ’22, ’24 and ’25 are currently listed as “TBD.” That’s because while the three contract bowls, Rose, Sugar, and Orange are locked in for the entire 12 years, the spots currently occupied by the Fiesta, Cotton and Peach come up for bid again after six. The CFP plans to determine them in 2018.

— Finally, who knew that Dec. 31 is a federal holiday when Jan. 1 is a Saturday? That’s the case in 2021, the lone remaining year when a New Year’s Eve semifinal will fall on a Friday.

While the CFP will inevitably still take flack for those three seasons when their night game intrudes on peoples’ parties, I always believed their bigger miscalculation was underestimating how many people work a full day and thus miss the early game. That scenario will no longer come up. And the CFP and ESPN already moved this year’s start times an hour earlier, to 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. ET, to gain some space before the ball drops.

All in all, it’s a pretty sensible plan. And given this is college athletics, getting something like this done in fewer than seven months might qualify as a new administrative record.