Every fall, the NFL takes ownership of most days of the week. Sunday, Monday, Thursday, a Friday here and there and, come mid-December, Saturday. Every television show and many other forms of entertainment schedule themselves to stay out of the ratings behemoth that is the NFL.
College football is one of them. The sport already schedules most its marquee postseason event to avoid the NFL; it’s why the national championship game has long been played on Monday night. Even the national semifinals of the 12-team College Football Playoff are played on Thursday and Friday nights.
And for the second consecutive year, two of the College Football Playoff’s first-round games will go up against a pair of NFL regular-season matchups. It’s the first Saturday of the season for NFL action; the league is legally allowed to broadcast games on Saturdays beginning with the third Saturday of December, thanks to the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. That provision was meant to protect college football and its sacred fall Saturdays. It did not foresee a 12-team Playoff with an additional four rounds of games that needed to be played further into winter.
Last year, the NFL drew an average of 15.5 million viewers for its Saturday afternoon Chiefs-Texans game, compared to just 6.6 million viewers that watched Penn State-SMU in a first-round CFP game. The later Ravens-Steelers game attracted 15.4 million viewers, with Texas-Clemson drawing 8.9 million viewers. The CFP’s standalone first-round games — Friday night’s Notre Dame-Indiana matchup and Saturday night’s Ohio State-Tennessee game — both averaged more than 13 million viewers.
This year, the CFP and its media partners can expect much of the same. They’ve scheduled the two games with the biggest spreads — Ole Miss-Tulane and Oregon-JMU — as the two that will go up against NFL games, and both of those games will be on TNT (sublicensed from ESPN).
CFP executive director Rich Clark told NBC Sports that the CFP and the NFL have both adjusted kickoff times this year to lessen the overlap, but it does still exist. The college kickoffs moved up a half hour, and the NFL kickoffs moved back a bit, so there’s a 90-minute standalone window for the first CFP game this time. Ole Miss-Tulane kicks off at 3:30pm ET, with Oregon-JMU scheduled for 7:30pm ET. Eagles-Commanders kicks off at 5pm ET, with Packers-Bears set for 8:20pm ET. Clark said that the CFP was the one to propose offsetting the kickoff times to decrease the overlap, and that he was grateful to the NFL for agreeing to tweak its times.
“We realize that the NFL has been playing on that Saturday for a long time,” Clark said. “Our initial talks were to see how we could de-conflict.”
Clark said he believes that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell cares about the state of college football. It’s the first thing he mentioned to Clark when he met him for the first time last year — that the collegiate system allows the NFL to work the way it does, and that the NFL wants to be “good partners” to college football. The sport helps create and develop the NFL stars of tomorrow, after all. Like Oregon quarterback Dante Moore or Miami edge defender Rueben Bain Jr., both in action this weekend and potential top-five draft picks come April.
Clark has met with Goodell, EVP and Chief Operating Officer of NFL Media Hans Schroeder, and other league executives involved in scheduling multiple times over the past two seasons. Clark said that the first conversations happened too late last season “to really make any major changes” to either schedule. This year, the two sides began talking early in the fall and had agreed on their solution by October. Clark knew that if the CFP wasn’t willing to move its games off of this particular weekend, it needed to compromise. So, it suggested tweaked kickoff times.
“We met probably three times to try to figure out a way to work through it, and this was, I think, the best we could do,” Clark said.
For now. There is another option moving forward, but it’s more drastic — shifting the whole schedule of the CFP.
Moving up the start of the CFP first round by one week is “not off the table,” Clark said. That would allow the 12-team CFP to get all four games in without direct competition against the NFL that Saturday. Using that second weekend of December might also prove to be a necessity if the CFP were to expand beyond 12 teams anyway. The Army-Navy game would no longer be the only college football game that day, but leaders from both academies have acknowledged in recent weeks that CFP expansion might force them to share the weekend regardless.
Clark said that the commissioners and presidents who oversee the CFP prefer to keep the current two-week break between conference championship games and the first round for players’ health and safety reasons, but that leaders “will look at it and evaluate it as they do every year.”
“It’s a space that continually comes up in discussions,” Clark said.
