Look at social media and you’ll see: 2025 preseason college football rankings starting to emerge. A combination of Texas, Georgia, Ohio State and Oregon rule the top 10, which is fine and reasonable except for the fact that the 2024 season is not over yet.
Ohio State and Notre Dame, remember? They are the ones still alive in the College Football Playoffs; don’t even start for a few days, and here we are looking ahead to 2025. You don’t see this in the NFL; No one is predicting how the 2025 Chiefs will fare, or whether the Eagles will make the Super Bowl in 2026. But here we are in the land of college football, creating stories because, at the moment, there aren’t any to tell.
We get it: The College Football Content Industrial Complex abhors a vacuum, and there’s definitely a big gap in college football right now. The new 12-team CFP started a month ago (which seems like an eternity since it was on the other side of the holidays) and both teams have played exactly once since New Year’s Day.
For fans of a certain (older) age, college football always had a natural end: New Year’s Day. That’s why the Rose Bowl became legendary; You spent New Year’s Day shivering somewhere back east as two college teams in bright uniforms battled under the California sun. In later decades, there was first the Orange Bowl, the Rose Bowl in the afternoon and the Sugar Bowl at night, and all was right with the world.
But once the Bowl Championship Series began, the date of the bowl that would host the BCS championship game began to be pushed back to January: the 3rd or the 4th, depending on how the calendar fell. When the BCS discontinued a separate national championship game, its date was extended further into January, to the 7th or 8th. And during the early years of the four-team CFP, the Monday of the first full week of the year became de facto on the date of the national championship.
Now that day is open, and guess who fell for it: the NFL, which now schedules the final game of its wild-card weekend that Monday night. And that’s a perfect summary of the problem college football now faces.
The CFP is a wonderful source of football joy, match after match of (sometimes) exciting matchups that range from the unexpected to the sublime. The problem is that the expanded CFP now requires four weeks of games, not two, and fitting those games into the busiest slot of the year is no easy task.
College football is fighting four forces: the academic calendar, holidays, tradition and the NFL. Each of them individually would be manageable; Together, they have forced college football into the awkward and extended limbo we see today.
The fundamental reason college football exists (real colleges) is the most often ignored element of the entire superstructure. But there is an academic cost to extending a nine-game season to 12 or 16 that Notre Dame and Ohio State will play. Oddly enough, this is a massive disruption to the academic calendars of all the students involved in the team: players, support staff, band, etc. Combine that with the holidays and you can’t just continue into December with games; some of them will end up falling on Christmas or Christmas Eve. (Don’t be surprised if you eventually watch college football over the holidays, though. Money has a way of brushing aside family and academic objections.)
The CFP has so far done the best possible job of incorporating tradition (i.e., New Year’s Day bowls) into its framework, but it remains an anchor of buried, immobile programming. More worrying is the NFL, which claims an increasing proportion of the weekends as January progresses. And no one is moving the NFL. In any case, as the NBA discovered on Christmas, the NFL comes with everything it can.
What can be done?
That brings us to where we are now, where the college football world is already looking past the championship game instead of getting excited about the game. (We haven’t even touched on the craziness of opening the transfer portal right in the middle of all this.) So what can be done to keep the momentum going and prevent the college football season from becoming too extended?
It is notable that despite all the initial changes proposed for the CFP, scheduling is not really in the conversation. It’s simply too big an obstacle to overcome at this time. With no more weekends being created, college football has to get creative with the ones it has.
The options, then, are pretty obvious: start the season early or eliminate parts of the season as is. Moving up the season would have its own ripple effects, including moving rivalry games from their traditional Thanksgiving weekend dates. But the other options are equally complicated: Get rid of the conference championship games and all the revenue that comes with them, or start the playoffs on the same December weekend as the marquee Army-Navy game, which would require some serious political proposals.
Anyway, change has to come. The college football season has been exciting and the playoffs have provided some of the best games of the year. It’s only fair that in the future we give each season the final send-off it truly deserves.
Maybe then we can stop waiting for next season before the current one ends.