College Football Playoff boss says New Year's Eve semis maybe not the best idea

Published Nov. 15, 2016 3:51 p.m. ET

Stewart Mandel

HOOVER, Ala. — College Football Playoff officials are finally acknowledging that New Year’s Eve semifinals might not have been the best idea.

After months of repeatedly spinning last year’s Dec. 31 ratings free-fall by cautioning media that “one year does not make a trend,” executive director Bill Hancock took a different tone with a group of reporters here Wednesday.

“We will be exploring whether there’s a better way for those semifinals,” he said during a break at SEC Media Days. “... Our goal is to find the best day when the most people can watch the games.”

Any change to the semifinals schedule would not occur until the 2018-19 season. This year’s Dec. 31 semis at the Fiesta and Peach Bowls happen to fall on a Saturday, and the Jan. 1 Rose and Sugar Bowls take their turn the following year.

Currently, the 2018 semifinals at the Orange and Cotton Bowls would fall on Monday, Dec. 31.

Last year’s Clemson-Oklahoma and Alabama-Michigan State semifinal games suffered a staggering 36 percent drop in viewership from Year 1 of the new system, with the first game drawing 15.6 million, the second 18.6 million. The year before, roughly 28 million apiece watched Florida State-Oregon and Ohio State-Alabama on New Year’s Day.

“This is a first-world problem, because millions of people watched the [2015] semifinals,” said Hancock, “just not as many millions as watched the year before.”

ESPN executives gave a presentation to the commissioners with more details about those numbers at the CFP’s annual meetings in April. Hancock’s tone seems to have changed since.

Asked whether it was still a priority for CFP officials to “change the paradigm of New Year’s Eve in this country,” as he boasted at the time, Hancock replied: “The bigger priority is to find the best day when the most people can watch the games.”

Changing the dates won’t be as simple as it sounds because the Rose and Sugar have preexisting contracts that guarantee them their Jan. 1 time slots annually, but officials have two years to figure out a way around it.

Also Wednesday, Hancock praised the Big 12’s decision to reinstitute a championship game in 2017, mirroring the other four major conferences. He emphasized, though, that the primary benefit is not necessarily the fact that all champions will now play 13 games but that the Big 12’s champ will now add another top 25-caliber opponent to its resume.

“How much the Big 12 will be helped by getting another game against a quality opponent — to me, that’s the game-changer,” said Hancock. "... It’s not as much an actual 13th data point but adding another quality opponent.”