Look around social media and you’ll see them start to pop up – 2025 preseason college football rankings. A combination of Texas, Georgia, Ohio State and Oregon dominate the top 10, which is good and reasonable, except that the 2024 season isn’t even over yet.
Ohio State and Notre Dame – remember? They are the ones who are still alive in the College Football Playoffs – don’t even start for a few days, and here we’re looking at 2025. You don’t see that 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 college football country, creating stories because there aren’t any, for at the moment, none to tell.
We get it: the college football content industrial complex abhors a vacuum, and there’s most certainly a hell of a vacuum 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 these two teams have played exactly once since New Year’s Day.
For fans of a certain (older) age, college football has always had a natural endpoint: New Year’s Day. This is why the Rose Bowl has become legendary; you spent New Year’s Day shivering somewhere in the East while two college teams in shiny uniforms battled it out in the California sun. In later decades, you had the Orange Bowl first, the Rose Bowl in the afternoon, and the Sugar Bowl at night, and all was right in the world.
But once the Bowl Championship Series began, the date of the bowl hosting the BCS championship game began to push back until January — the 3rd or 4th, depending on which way the calendar fell. When the BCS discontinued a separate national championship game, its date extended even further into January, to the 7th or 8th. And in the early years of the four-team CFP, the Monday of the first week full year has become the de facto date of the national championship.
Now that day is left open, and guess who swallowed it up – the NFL, which is now hosting the final game of its Wild Card Weekend this Monday night. And that perfectly sums up the problem college football is currently facing.
The CFP is a wonderful blessing of footballing joy, match after match of (sometimes) thrilling football confrontations 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 space of the year is no easy task.
College football faces four forces: the academic calendar, holidays, tradition and the NFL. Each of these individually would be manageable; together, they pushed college football into the embarrassing and extensive limbo we know today.
The fundamental reason college football exists – the colleges themselves – is the most often overlooked element of the entire superstructure. But there is an academic cost to extending a season from nine games to 12 and then to the 16 that Notre Dame and Ohio State will play. As strange as it may seem, this represents a massive disruption to academic schedules for all students involved with the team – players, support staff, band, et cetera. Combine that with the holidays, and you can’t just spend December with games; some of them will end up falling on Christmas or Christmas Eve. (Don’t be surprised, though, if you end up seeing college football over the holidays. Money has the power to override family and academic objections.)
The CFP has done as good a job as possible so far of integrating the tradition – i.e. New Year’s bowls – into its framework, but it remains a buried and unmoving anchor of the calendar. Of greater concern is the NFL, which claims an increasingly larger share of weekends as January progresses. And no one is moving the NFL. Rather, as the NBA found out over Christmas, the NFL will do whatever it can.
What can we do?
So that brings us to where we are today, with the college football world already looking beyond the championship game instead of getting fired up. (We haven’t even talked about the craziness of opening the transfer portal in the middle of all this.) So what needs to be done to keep the momentum going and prevent the college football season from stretching out too long ?
It should be noted that despite all the initial changes proposed for the CFP… reseeding, automatic qualifiers, host sites – planning isn’t really part of the conversation. This is simply too huge a hurdle to overcome at this point. Since there are no more weekends created, college football has to get creative with the ones it has.
So the options are pretty obvious: start the season early or remove pieces of the season as is. Moving the season earlier would have its own ripple effects, including moving rivalry games off their traditional Thanksgiving weekend dates. But the other options are just as fraught: getting rid of the conference championship games and all the revenue that comes with them, or starting the playoffs on the same December weekend as Army and Marine, which would require some serious political stones to propose.
Either way, change must happen. The college football season has been exciting, and the playoffs have delivered some of the best games of the year. It’s only fitting that moving forward, we give each season the crescendo of a farewell that it truly deserves.
Maybe then we can stop looking forward to next season before the current one is over.
