IRVING, Texas — As the 12-team College Football Playoff finally comes into focus ahead of its 2024 debut, its leaders have acknowledged that they’re prepared to go head-to-head with the behemoth that is the NFL.
CFP executive director Bill Hancock confirmed Thursday that the CFP will put three first-round games on the same day as regular-season NFL games in December 2024, though it will avoid NFL wild-card games in January by playing on weeknights.
Advertisement
With just one season to go before the CFP expands to a 12-team postseason format, some of the organization’s most pressing questions still need answers. Leaders have not announced broadcast plans for the 2024 and 2025 seasons, details that will rely on decisions made by ESPN, the CFP’s exclusive partner for its current deal, which expires at the end of the 2025-26 season.
Then, of course, comes a brand-new CFP contract for 2026 and beyond — complete with all its questions about additional media partners and a new approach to revenue distribution, among others. The 10 FBS conference commissioners who (along with Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick) make up the CFP Management Committee do not know exactly where they will eventually land on some of these topics.
But there is agreement in at least one area, after conversations with CFP stakeholders this week at the annual spring meeting: No matter what they tweak or tinker with, the month of December is going to be very, very crowded.
“Understand that you’re fitting in championship games, final exams, coaching transition, early signing, transfer portal, NFL games, Army–Navy, commencement and New Year’s Day. There’s a lot there,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said.
Nailing down dates — and facing off with the NFL
Hancock said Thursday that three of the four first-round CFP games will be played on the third Saturday of December, with the other first-round game played on Friday. Those three Saturday games will go up against NFL games; that is the weekend that the NFL begins playing three regular-season games on Saturdays.
Three quarterfinal games will be played on New Year’s Day, with the fourth quarterfinal game played on New Year’s Eve. The two semifinal games will be played on weeknights (Thursday and Friday) to avoid NFL games on wild-card weekend, Hancock confirmed. The national championship game will remain on Monday night and will be played at least a week after the semifinal games.
Advertisement
For the 2024-25 season, that means the first-round games will be Dec. 20-21, with quarterfinal games on Jan. 1 and either Dec. 31 or Jan. 2, semifinal games around Jan. 9-10 and the championship game on Jan. 20. Teams’ trips to bowl sites are expected to last significantly shorter than they do now.
Final clarity around schedules for the 2024 and 2025 seasons will come once the CFP finalizes its media rights deal for those two years. Hancock did not have any updates on negotiations with ESPN, which gets first dibs on the additional games during the current term of its contract. (The CFP is expected to take its new contract for 2026 and beyond to market, and representatives from at least two conferences hope to end up with multiple media partners in the new deal. Fox has already said it’s interested.)
College football has long tried to avoid putting its product directly up against the NFL. The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 prevents the NFL from airing games on Friday nights and Saturdays, through the second Saturday in December, to protect high school and college football. But adding more college games in December and January always ran the risk of running into more NFL game days.
GO DEEPER
Vannini: The battle for TV time slots between college football and the NFL is coming
“It’s reality,” Sankey said. “I fully respect the NFL and its model. If we intersect, so be it. It’s not meant to be anything at all disrespectful or frustrating. They’ve expanded their season; that has implications for early January.”
The 2020 SEC championship game took place during an NFL game window due to COVID-19 calendar changes, but the 2022 Sugar Bowl moved to 11 a.m. CT on New Year’s Eve to avoid a primetime conflict with Monday Night Football. Fully avoiding the NFL, with so many additional games and dates ahead, seems impossible. Commissioners would like to engage more directly with the NFL on the calendar issue in the future; after all, college football is the NFL’s farm system. College football leaders hope that the NFL will work with them more, understanding that this sport benefits them in important ways.
Advertisement
Will college football move up its regular season to Week 0?
The idea of moving the regular season up a week — so that all regular-season games begin the weekend before Labor Day, in what is currently called Week 0 — is “losing steam,” American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco said. That adjustment is not an option to implement in time for the 2024 or 2025 seasons, putting it squarely on the backburner, he said. MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said there isn’t yet a consensus or enough feedback from schools on the issue.
Could starting in Week 0 work for 2026 and beyond? It’s possible, but it would be quite complicated.
“You run into issues any time you try to do anything with the calendar,” Aresco said. “With Week 0, you have camps, and they’d have to move earlier and they conflict with summer school. That’s a real issue. Do the camps need to be as lengthy as they are? That’s something that will need to be discussed by the various committees.
“You move things earlier, do you want to play championship games on Thanksgiving weekend when students aren’t there? Do you want to move Army-Navy? … Every time you do something, it affects something else.”
Aresco said he expects the NCAA’s Division I Football Oversight Committee to eventually discuss the issue, with commissioner input. As of now, even among commissioners, opinions appear split.
“We have to continue to consider Week 0, in my view,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said. “I don’t think anybody’s ready to say we can’t do it or we can do it. Navigating the fluidity of this thing is challenging. … These things are running in parallel tracks in my view, with television and dates and some of those things, along with what does that look like with the (schedule) compression that we all know is going to take place with these added games?”
Last year, Phillips pushed for a holistic review of the college football calendar, conceding that changes may need to be made if additional games were being tacked on at the end of the year. The NCAA’s football rules committee recently adopted three rule changes aimed at decreasing the number of snaps per game, which would thereby cut exposures and opportunities for injuries.
Advertisement
One way to address health and safety concerns could be to begin the regular season a week early but keep the back end of the schedule the same, allowing for each team to have an additional idle week. But the other option tied to Week 0 is mostly about logistical and scheduling assistance. If the whole season moves up a week, the CFP can play its first-round games before the NFL begins Saturday play. It would also mean semifinals on New Year’s Day, which would maximize the spotlight on a holiday that college football traditionally owns.
Home-site tickets, hotels and other miscellaneous issues
The CFP wants to have consistent policies for on-campus Playoff games while also highlighting the unique atmospheres of home stadiums. Issues surrounding visitor ticket allotment and visiting fan seat locations have yet to be settled, as different conferences have different policies for the regular season. The same goes for accommodating potential visiting bands.
The home team will sell the tickets for the game, and season-ticket holders are expected to have an opportunity to buy tickets. Home stadium traditions (“Jump Around” at Wisconsin, for example) will happen, but the game will incorporate the visiting team more than a regular-season matchup would.
“It’ll be a home game with pageantry, but there will also be visiting-team pageantry, similar to what happens in bowl games,” Hancock said. “We do not want to take away the pageantry that happens like normal.”
Hotel assignments are another important logistical factor that have yet to be determined. Should a school book out a large block of local hotels in December before the season and cancel if the team is out of the CFP race? Should the CFP handle that? Those rooms need to be booked far in advance, especially in remote college towns.
“We’re talking about how to manage that,” Steinbrecher said. “Is it a local issue? A national issue we manage from a centralized place? We’re working through those details.”
While the other bowl games are not under the CFP umbrella, they will also need to be scheduled around the CFP dates more meticulously than they are now, with games happening before, during and after early-round CFP games.
Advertisement
“Bowl games are valuable inventory not just for the games themselves, but also to promote the CFP games coming up,” said Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli, who added that he doesn’t expect there to be fewer bowl games nor a change in the bowl-eligibility requirements as a result of the expanded Playoff.
As part of the three-day annual spring meetings, officials from each of the New Year’s Six bowls met individually with the CFP in 30-minute sessions on Tuesday to discuss their process and pitch their value. It was the first time in several years such a formal meeting took place, and it served as a stark reminder of how many different parties have a hand in this Playoff process.
Those New Year’s Six bowl contracts all expire after the 2025-26 season, along with the CFP itself. That creates truly a clean slate beginning in 2026, making the 2024 and 2025 seasons a trial run of sorts for the 12-team bracket. Athletic directors at Oklahoma and Clemson told The Athletic last year they want quarterfinal games to also take place on campus. It’s an idea that could gain momentum — and that understandably makes bowl executives a little nervous.
As Hancock came out to talk with reporters at the conclusion of meetings Thursday, he distributed a bracket with the 2022 CFP ranking results laid out in the 2024 bracket format, in which Clemson and Utah would have had byes to quarterfinal games and TCU and Ohio State would’ve hosted first-round games. It highlighted one of the CFP’s biggest public challenges ahead of 2024: getting fans to understand the importance of seedings and conference championships, rather than just rankings. The CFP ranking show on ESPN will be tasked with emphasizing this, too.
That adjustment will be one of the many changes coming in the 12-team Playoff era.
(Photo: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)