College football’s season finale had more viewers than any non-NFL sporting event since Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, when the lovable loser Chicago Cubs won their first title in more than a century.
It was a massive number. But could it have been even bigger if the sport wasn’t doing itself a disservice?
Indiana clinched its spot in the national championship game on Jan. 9. Between the end of the win over Oregon and the kickoff of its title-game victory over Miami, there were 10 NFL playoff games. The sport’s momentum had been replaced by the NFL. The title game was played after a pair of mostly thrilling doubleheaders on Saturday and Sunday to set up the NFL’s conference championship games.
Last year’s national championship — a competitive matchup between two of the three biggest brands in the sport — garnered an average of 22.1 million viewers. That was four million fewer than a dominant Michigan victory over Washington a year earlier and was the third-lowest television rating for a championship game since the advent of the Playoff in 2014.
The expanded Playoff has been a boon to the sport, but may have produced a championship game layoff problem. This year, Indiana’s story masked it. College football had the luxury of a Disney movie playing out in real life on the field, led by a highly meme-able head coach who’s gone from unknown to household name almost overnight.
But it feels a lot like a one-year solution. Is it any coincidence the game did numbers similar to the Cubs almost a decade ago? That’s catnip to a casual audience, adding eight million viewers who weren’t there a season ago. The sport can’t count on a once-in-a-lifetime storyline.
College football’s calendar is broken in more important ways, but a sport that once ended during the first week of January has stretched its ever-growing postseason into the thick of the NFL playoffs. And it’s not getting better.
If you didn’t like college football’s title game on Jan. 19, you won’t like the next three years.
Next season’s championship is set for Jan. 25, 2027, in Las Vegas. In 2028, it’s scheduled for Jan. 24. In 2029, Jan. 22.
For most of its existence, college football ended on New Year’s Day or the first week of January. In 2006, it added a BCS championship game that moved the finale to Jan. 8.
It reached Jan. 10 for the first time in 2010. Once the four-team Playoff arrived, the national championship lived in the second week of January. Adding eight more teams to the field pushed the title game around 10 days later, into the third week.
Next year, from New Year’s Day until the championship game, there will be two college football games in 23 days. A team that follows Indiana’s path — win the conference championship and get a first-round bye — will play three games in 51 days to win a title.
No other sport is spacing out postseason games in a way that feels unnatural to the flow of a season. And when there are only two games in a three-week window, it’s going to be hard to stay in the conversation among non-diehard fans who thrust a sport into the forefront of the national conversation.
In between the semifinals and the title game, I spent a few days at the American Football Coaches Association convention, where thousands of coaches gather.
In nearly every conversation, the calendar was a hot topic. The solutions varied, but they all had one thing in common: end the season earlier.
It would fix many of the issues currently ailing the sport, but it would also fix a title-game placement problem. Beyond the long wait for fans, programs and coaches are wondering if earning a first-round bye is more of a curse than a blessing. Teams who didn’t play in the first round of the Playoff are 1-7 so far in the 12-team Playoff and just 2-6 against the spread.
The best and most realistic plan I heard from a coach was moving the opening week of the season up to what has been known as Week 0. Next year, that’s Aug. 29.
Play the full season with an additional bye week folded in. Rivalry week would still be Thanksgiving. Championship games would stay where they are in the first week of December.
But now, the first round of the Playoff could be December 12. Quarterfinals would move to the following week. Take a break for Christmas and play the semifinals on New Year’s Day.
The portal window stays Jan. 2-16, and only teams in the national championship would still be playing.
Then move the title game to Jan. 8.
Layoffs are gone. Teams with byes get one extra week to heal up, but aren’t sitting around for three-plus weeks between games. Bowls can work around that schedule to make TV people happy. There’s a case it would pay off for everyone.
It’s a reasonable solution that would fix many of the sport’s other calendar issues, keep the sport consistently in the headlines and end the season on a more reasonable timeline.
College football’s scheduling does its championship game a disservice, even if that’s down the list of calendar problems in a broken sport that used to operate within a single semester and now stretches into a second.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
