The College Football Playoff on Tuesday announced the dates for the next two quarterfinals and semifinals. You could hear the sighing from coaches — and many others in the sport.
It’s already a point of contention that the end of the season now pushes into late January, and the gap between playoff games is only increasing. That’s only one tension related to the sport’s calendar, which could be a dominant issue this offseason.
Should the transfer portal move (again)? Should the high school signing period move (again)? What about spring football? Can the start of the season move up — and with it the Playoff?
Any changes would only occur next year at the earliest. And much like everything in college sports, change will be hard because no one person or entity is in charge.
But some are at least trying.
Here’s a primer on the issues, starting with the one that has the best chance of happening:
Could Week 0 become the new opening week?
Labor Day weekend is the traditional start of college football season, and teams have to get an NCAA waiver to play a week earlier. But as more teams have done so — leading Week 0 to enter the vernacular — a consensus has formed to let everyone do it.
It would give college football two weekends before the NFL regular season begins. It would give teams another bye week, something more valuable as teams play more grueling schedules. By late August, most teams are ready to start their seasons anyway.
The main drawback is the summer heat. But high school teams in the South have been opening in August for years — albeit normally at night — and there’s sentiment moving toward overcoming that one drawback.
Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks, who co-chairs an NCAA committee on the calendar, said there has “been a lot of discussion” about making Week 0 the new opener.
“That’s one I think that’s got a lot of traction,” Brooks said last Friday.
The 2026 schedule is set, but a move this year would give time to schools to start rearranging their 2027 and beyond schedules. It’s also something that doesn’t really depend on the other calendar issues.
Everything else, though, has plenty of complications.
Moving the CFP up
Oregon coach Dan Lanning spoke for a lot of coaches in December when he voiced two frustrations with the CFP format: Teams with byes not hosting quarterfinal games, and too long a gap between conference championship games and the first CFP games for teams with byes.
Lanning had a unique perspective. Oregon had a first-round bye and lost last year, then didn’t have a bye this season and beat Texas Tech, which had the long layoff. Oregon was in much better rhythm playing a first-round game, Lanning said, and disrupting that rhythm wasn’t fair to the team with the bye.
“It’s just a lot of time in between,” Lanning said. “In my opinion, Playoff games should be played in sequential order and really quickly.”
This all came up when Brooks met with eight head coaches — two from each of the power conferences — during the American Football Coaches Association convention in mid-January. Brooks, whose Georgia team is now 0-2 in the Playoff coming off a bye, is sympathetic.
But the CFP schedule is actually going in the opposite direction: The next two sets of semifinal games are scheduled for Jan. 14-15, 2027, and Jan. 13-14, 2028, with the national championships set for Jan. 25 and Jan. 24, respectively.
Much of the reason for that is to keep the quarterfinals on Jan. 1. The first-round games, now two weeks after conference championship weekend, theoretically could move up a week, but Army-Navy being that weekend is a consideration.
There’s plenty of sentiment to move everything up so that the semifinals are on Jan. 1. But ESPN, which holds the Playoff broadcast rights, likes having four Playoff games, rather than two, to spread around Jan. 1.
On this issue, it seems clear that there is a dividing line between coaches wanting competitive fairness, and the CFP (meaning the conference commissioners) deferring to its television partners. And the latter makes the decision.
National signing day
Hey, remember this? In the old days, all high school and junior college players would sign on the first Wednesday of February. That would be this week, and technically it did still happen. But hardly anybody new signed and it was an afterthought because of the December “early” signing period, which was adopted eight years ago.
That was over the objections of the SEC, whose commissioner, Greg Sankey, issued an “I told you so” when asked about Lane Kiffin leaving Ole Miss for LSU before the Playoff. Now there is some sentiment to go back to the old days.
The motivation would be the same as for why coaches pushed the transfer portal period to January: make December easier, especially for Playoff teams. But many signees now enroll early in January anyway, so would it do much?
A couple of other ideas: A signing day in August before high school players’ senior year. Or just letting players sign when they want. Right now, no ideas have immense traction, with more of a focus on what’s become the more intense signing period.
Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks co-chairs an NCAA committee on the calendar. (Joshua L. Jones / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
Transfer portal date
Moving the portal back to Jan. 2-16 only helped coaches’ quality of life a little bit, and it didn’t stop Kiffin from feeling like he needed to take the LSU job before the Playoff. There was still plenty of portal activity in December, with teams talking to players and agents, whether it was about new contracts or back-channel moves.
The spring portal period being eliminated may make things easier in a few months. But it also may have concentrated all of the moves into the winter period.
Brooks, who was involved in discussions that resulted in last year’s portal changes, acknowledged that more could come.
“Every scenario you look at, there’s a bunch of consequences from that, intended and unintended, and fleshing all those out and deciding the lesser of two evils is where you wind up when you’re making tough calendar decisions,” Brooks said. “Trust me, I’ve heard from lots of ADs and from lots of coaches. Everybody’s got a lot of great ideas, but every idea has consequences, and we’re trying to basically put all those together and say, what are the what are the things we’re willing to live with? Of the things we clearly want to change, what are the things we can’t change? What are the consequences we’re willing to deal with from that?”
Spring football vs. OTAs
Finally, this is a move that could also be made independent of what happens with everything else, especially the playoff schedule. It does tie in with the portal decision.
Some teams have moved away from spring games, but the spring practice schedule — 15 practices, including three scrimmages — has remained due to NCAA rules. There’s movement now to just transition to what the NFL does: Organized team activities (OTAs), perhaps spread out during spring and summer. The NCAA already allows more in terms of summer workouts than 10-20 years ago, so it wouldn’t be that much of a change.
What will be interesting to watch is how many spring games are played now that there is no longer a spring portal window. One theory on why teams were doing away with spring games was that players wouldn’t have a public showing of their spot on the depth chart and decide to leave.
Otherwise, the idea of going from spring practice to OTAs is another acknowledgment that college football is a year-round sport. Everyone agrees on that.
When to do what within that year, however, remains the debate.
