The Alabama Crimson and the Georgia Bulldogs will be playing for the College Football Playoff National Championship on Monday night in Atlanta, Ga. Both teams will have just one week to prepare, as it has been ever since the CFP started in 2014. One person who isn’t happy about the short amount of time between games is Alabama head coach Nick Saban, who had this to say about the quick turnaround.
Nick Saban on the College Football Playoff schedule: ‘Someone has to think about the players’
Both teams will have just a week to prepare for the title game.
Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images
“Someone has to think about the players,” Saban said via ESPN. “And not what’s convenient for the media or TV.”
Saban said that it wasn’t until after 1 a.m. that Alabama began packing up to leave the Allstate Sugar Bowl after beating Clemson 24-6, which meant that the team needed to spend the night in New Orleans and return to Tuscaloosa in the morning.
Saban, who’s been known to do well against teams when he has more than a month to prepare, does have a right to think it’s a short amount of time for a national title game. But the reality is that’s the nature of the beast of having a college football playoff.
For starters, every other division that has multiple-round playoffs, like the FCS, DII, and DIII schools, all have just a week between games. An alternative could be to have the Playoff games a little before the rest of other later bowl games, but then that may throw off the rest of the New Year’s Six bowls that aren’t in the semifinal game mix. Or giving an additional week between the semis and national title, I guess.
At the end of the day, there’s no perfect way to have a college football playoff and make each and every single person happy, but perhaps we see some tweaks to the system as the years go along.
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