In the lead up to the second-ever Playoff, the first on New Year’s Eve, I argued the scheduling arrangement wasn’t such a bad thing. Going out on New Year’s Eve, after all, can be not that great! It’s more expensive, crowded, and sad than going out on just about any other night of the year.
I was wrong about the College Football Playoff on New Year’s Eve, but now it’s being fixed
What was painfully obvious to most is thankfully now a thing of the past.
Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images
And I love college football. And you might at least humor it. So what could be better than trying to spice up something not that hot?
I was so wrong.
Even worse than forcing football fans all around the company to pivot their social plans on a dime, the first semifinal took place in the middle of what was still a work day for the majority of the country. Accordingly, nobody watched.
TV viewership from year one of the Playoff, which took place on New Year’s Day, to year two was down as much as 45 percent. Even in the rapidly evolving world of mobile-primary consumption and ball parking for the number of prospective viewers watching together at parties or bars, that’s one hell of a drop off.
ESPN reportedly wound up having to negotiate make-goods with advertisers to the tune of a $20 million loss.
The games being bad certainly didn’t help.
After a tight first half, Clemson boat raced Oklahoma, 37-17. Michigan State essentially never bothered showing up in a 38-0 loss to eventual national champion Alabama.
If you’re going to push forward an unpopular scheduling setup, you have to hope for at least one compelling reason to stay in or alienate your friends by keeping your eyes glued to a phone or TV. Two blowouts? No chance.
The Playoff powers still defended the arrangement for a while. In a painfully predictable fashion, no less.
Maybe it simply took time and introspection. Perhaps it was the weight of corporate partners knowing damn well every available metric showed that they could do better.
Whatever the rhyme or reason -- and this is a billion dollar business we’re talking about, so you do the math -- the Playoff caved. Beginning in 2018, all Playoffs will take place on Saturdays and national holidays. Exclusively.
Three times in the next eight years, college football’s semifinals will still fall on New Year’s Eve, but they’ll be played on Fridays or Saturdays. The games had already been moved up an hour this coming season, to 3 and 7 p.m. ET respectively, to accommodate your New Year’s Eve party if you lived in the Eastern time zone. With no New Year’s Eve on federal workdays, the conflicts are even less jarring.
The royal college football rarely sees the error of its own ways. It took the sport almost a hundred years to declare a champion on the field ... sort of. It took another two decades or so for that to be refined and formalized. And when it finally got here, it became hard to figure out why it wasn’t always done this way.
The sport pulled its most dedicated and casual followers alike through a bad plan. Defending it as a new tradition, when New Year’s Day itself has long been the traditional day for big games, was illogical. You can’t start celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve and hope no one notices the difference.
While we may be unlikely to see any other prominent sporting body take the L, admit it could do better, and commit to doing so publicly for some time, that’s where we stand today. As fans of something great actually making itself greater, we might as well enjoy it for what it is.
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