This year, the College Football Playoff National Championship was played on Monday, Jan. 19. Next year’s National Championship will be played on Monday, Jan. 25, 2027. It doesn’t take a college football expert to conclude the current configuration of the college football calendar is ludicrous and makes no sense.
Here’s what we’d do to fix it.
This season, the transfer portal was open from Jan. 2-16, in the middle of the CFP. The portal was opened earlier than it used to so players could enroll in classes
at their new schools prior to the next semester opening. That makes perfectly logical sense — after all, these are “student-athletes” we’re talking about. The facade of class scheduling mattering should remain in place for college football to retain some of its charm.
We’ve determined the portal should stay roughly in the same place as it currently is, so when should the National Championship be played? Working backwards, the incredibly logical date would be New Year’s Day. Football is a fall sport at the end of the day and should be wrapped up by Jan. 1.
If you want to get sentimental, I see no reason why the National Championship shouldn’t be played at the Rose Bowl every year. Now that the Rose Bowl tradition of Pac-12 Champion vs. Big Ten Champion is completely dead, why not put it as the preeminent college football game each season? A National Championship on New Year’s Day at the Rose Bowl in the traditional time slot so fans can see the sunset over the San Gabriel Mountains sounds spectacular to me.
Now we get to the hard part.
For a National Championship to be played on Jan. 1, the entire CFP bracket would have to be played in December. Let’s assume CFP expansion is off the table — for a 12-team playoff to occur, you need four weeks of games with the final “week” being the National Championship. My proposed playoff would look like this:
- Saturday, Dec. 5: Conference Championship Weekend
- Saturday, Dec. 12: CFP First Round
- Saturday, Dec. 19: CFP Quarterfinals
- Saturday, Dec. 26: CFP Semifinals
- Friday, Jan. 1: CFP National Championship
The pros here are fairly obvious. The season would wrap up sooner and not extend two months past the end of some team’s seasons, the portal wouldn’t open until after the National Championship, and there wouldn’t be a dead period of no football in mid-December.
However, I must acknowledge the cons of this plan as well. The annual Army-Navy game would either need to be moved or played concurrently with the first round of the CFP. While it’s one of my favorite games played each year, it holds valuable real estate on the college football calendar, and players would get no significant time off between the regular season and the playoffs. Lastly, the semifinalists would have to play a game the day after Christmas, which may complicate travel plans.
To me, the pros far outweigh the cons in this proposal. Should the powers that be decide the lack of a break and/or Army-Navy be non-negotiable, the proposed pivot would be to move the entire season up a week. There’s nothing stopping college football from starting in late August instead of early September — in fact, a lot of college football fans already look forward to Week 0, so you might as well just have that be the official start of the season.
Will this proposal ever come to life? It’s highly unlikely.
As college football fans, we know television contracts and money rule the sport. The movers and shakers would undoubtedly balk at the idea of competing with the NFL on certain Saturdays in December. They also seem hellbent on keeping the National Championship on a Monday for reasons unknown.
What would you propose the NCAA do to fix the college football calendar? Let us know your thoughts down in the comments.
