Once the clock hits triple zeroes on Monday night, what we knew of the College Football Playoff will be over, and what the Playoff will become moves into sharper focus.
The format moves to 12 teams beginning next season, and ESPN remains in control of the television contract.
However, the original 12-year contract that founded the College Football Playoff expires after 2025. As Natasha Bedingfield once sang, college football's future remains unwritten, and Fox would like to have a large say in writing it.
According to a report from Front Office Sports, Fox is preparing to make a "massive" bid for the next CFP contract. As Michael McCarthy writes:
I’m hearing that Fox Sports is weighing a “massive” bid to snatch all or parts of the College Football Playoff away from ESPN. The strategy would make sense for Fox. The network’s Big Noon Kickoff pregame show has closed the TV ratings gap against ESPN’s iconic College GameDay. And Fox’s gambit to place its top games in the noon Saturday window, rather than in primetime, has proven to be a brilliant programming stroke by the company’s head of strategy and analytics, Mike Mulvihill.
Bringing in multiple bidders is a sure-fire way for the Playoff to drive maximum financial value out of the next contract, but regardless of the dollars and cents, splitting the 11 Playoff games among multiple networks is of critical importance for college football as a whole.
Whether intentional or not, many fans assume ESPN owns the Playoff, simply because the Worldwide Leader airs all the games. It is a matter of fact, not opinion, to many Florida State fans and neutral parties that Alabama made the CFP and FSU did not simply because Kirk Herbstreit and ESPN executives wanted the Crimson Tide in. Needless to say, that's not good for the health of the sport.
There's a reason the NFL splits its games among all four major networks. Money, yes. But exposure is just as big a reason, if not bigger. The NFL could park all its games on NFL Network and demand $50 a month from each cable subscriber, but they'd lose their stranglehold on the four major networks and, thus, on American culture. All four networks are also invested in college football (ABC/ESPN and Fox more heavily than CBS and NBC), and getting as many networks as possible involved in the 12-team CFP should be a high priority moving forward. Four partners would be great, three would be good, and two should be the absolute bare minimum.
“We all said for [2026], we would fully go to market with the media rights. What that conveyed is that everybody will have an opportunity to participate,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said in 2022. “We were always going to market. There’s no guarantee we’d go with multiple media partners. That’s a possibility, but we have to see the actual proposals.”
The new CFP TV contract will also be an opportunity to re-arrange the calendar. The 2024-25 calendars are already set:
2024
-- First round: Friday, Dec. 20-Saturday, Dec. 21
-- Quarterfinals: Tuesday, Dec. 31-Wednesday, Jan. 1
-- Semifinals: Thursday, Jan. 9-Friday, Jan. 10
-- Championship: Monday, Jan. 20
2025
-- First round: Friday, Dec. 19-Saturday, Dec. 20
-- Quarterfinals: Wednesday, Dec. 31-Thursday, Jan. 1
-- Semifinals: Thursday, Jan. 8-Friday, Jan. 9
-- Championship: Monday, Jan. 19
This is a make-shift arrangement constructed on the fly to commence the 12-team format two years early while satisfying existing contracts.
For 2026 and beyond, it should be a priority to play the semifinals on New Year's Day (with the Rose Bowl a permanent semifinal in its traditional spot) and play the championship game as soon as possible thereafter.
Stewart Mandel argued in 2022 that college football should collectively move its season up a week to play the semifinals on New Year's Day with the championship game in its traditional spot, the first full Monday after New Year's Day. That would mean championship games on Jan. 13, 2025; Jan. 12, 2026; and Jan. 11, 2027; and so on.
In an interview with KTCK-FM in Dallas, Fox analyst Joel Klatt argued for a similar, but in some ways even more radical plan: partnering with the NFL to stage the championship game on the Saturday of Wild Card Weekend.
"You need to move the championship off of Monday night and back to Saturday. College football is Saturdays," Klatt said. "You go to the NFL and you say, 'Listen, you're tapped out on windows, so why don't we share in the revenue of the national title game?' I would propose that that Saturday becomes a triple header of football. The first two legs of that triple header are NFL playoff games, and then the third is the national championship game. Whoever broadcasts the second NFL game would also have the national championship game."
Assuming the semifinals are played on New Year's Day, the Klatt Plan would take place over Wild Card weekend. The NFL already only plays two games on that Saturday -- a late afternoon game and a primetime game. To pull this off, the NFL would simply have to move its Wild Card games up three hours or so. (And it sure would be nice if the richest league in American sports didn't have to be paid off to do so.) This would also extend the season further than the Mandel Plan; the 2026 championship game would be played Saturday, Jan. 16, 2027.
ABC/ESPN aired the Wild Card Saturday games last season, garnering 17.7 million and 19 million viewers apiece. That would be a heckuva lead-in for the title game.
(If I'm on the CFP management committee that will ultimately make this decision, I would insist if not demand that ESPN simulcast its CFP games on ABC, as it does its NFL games.)
With the new Playoff format now one game away and a new contract just two seasons from right now, the time for outside the box thinking has arrived. And that starts with getting the Playoff on more than one network.