College football playoffs may be forced to face the NFL on television for the first time once the expanded 12-team field is implemented. That possibility became apparent as FBS commissioners continued to wrestle with the logistics of the expansion at meetings this week in Chicago.
CFP would need “at least” two days, according to CFP executive director Bill Hancock, to complete all four matches in the first round as well as the quarter-finals. In each round, two games would be played per day unless more days were needed due to scheduling conflicts.
The first round cannot begin until at least 12 days after the end of the conference championship games. Depending on the calendar, it would be the second or third week of December. In 2024 – the first year the bracket could be expanded to 12 teams – the earliest these first-round matches could be played is Thursday, December 19.
In addition to playing every Sunday, the NFL offers “Thursday Night Football” through late December and “Monday Night Football” through the Wild Card round of its playoffs. Beginning in the third week of December, the NFL also plays on Saturdays until its conference championship games are held.
This leaves little room for the PCP to have a stage of its own for the first two rounds of an expanded bracket. Neither a BCS championship game nor a college football playoff contest has faced the NFL since the BCS began in 1998.
“That wouldn’t be our preference,” Hancock said of the possibility of facing the NFL, “and we certainly know that the NFL [has] games this Thursday night and this Saturday, but we have to have those first round games, and we have to find dates for them.”
Once the first round is over, the quarter-final matches would be played at least seven days later, likely centered around New Year’s Day. The semi-finals and the CFP national championship would be played later in January.
The NFL is in the first of an 11-year deal with streaming giant Amazon, the new home of “Thursday Night Football.” A source suggests CFP feels more comfortable going up against a streamer rather than a linear cable or broadcast competitor.
Either way, it seems likely that CFP will have to contend with one of TV’s biggest giants to get their 11 games played in reasonable order.
“You might speculate that,” an official involved in the RFP process, “I can’t.”
PCP’s past brushings with the competition have yielded mixed results. In 2015, CFP insisted on playing their semi-final matches on New Year’s Eve, a Thursday night. Ratings fell 40% from the previous year. Since then, CFP has only played on New Year’s Eve when it fell on a Friday or Saturday.
The CFP management committee, made up of the 10 FBS commissioners and the president of Notre Dame, remains committed to the attempt to start the expanded playoffs in 2024. If not that year, 2025 will be in focus. This is the final year of CFP’s active 12-year contract with ESPN.
From 2026, the CFP will face another set of issues, perhaps the most important being income distribution. The playoffs could triple in annual value, from $600 million to perhaps $1.6 billion. At that point, who knows what the conference landscape will look like? The SEC and Big Ten have already established themselves as a “Power Two” due to their school rosters and monster media rights deals.
For now, the marshals are taking care of the logistics of the schedules. It is possible that the start of the season will be pushed back to week 0 in order to accommodate an expanded playoff. However, one person inside the room on Thursday called such a start “problematic”.
If the dates don’t line up in 2024 and 2025, the seasons would start on Labor Day weekend, as tradition dictates. This could result in the CFP National Championship being held later in January if the field is expanded in one of these seasons.