Look around social media and you’ll see them starting to crop up — 2025 preseason college football rankings. Some combination of Texas, Georgia, Ohio State and Oregon rules the top 10, which is fine and reasonable except for the fact that the 2024 season isn’t even over yet.
Ohio State and Notre Dame — remember? They’re the ones still alive in the College Football Playoff — don’t even kick off for another few days, and here we are looking ahead to 2025. You don’t see this in the NFL; nobody’s predicting how the 2025 Chiefs are going to fare, or whether the Eagles will make the Super Bowl in 2026. But here we are over in college football land, creating stories because there are, at the moment, none to tell.
We get it — the College Football Content Industrial Complex abhors a vacuum, and there is most definitely one hell of a vacuum in college football right now. The new 12-team CFP started a month ago — which feels like forever, since it was on the other side of the holidays — and both of these teams have played exactly once since New Year’s Day.
For fans of a certain (advancing) age, college football always had a natural endpoint: New Year’s Day. It’s why the Rose Bowl became legendary; you spent New Year’s Day shivering somewhere back east while two brilliant-uniformed college squads did battle in the California sunshine. In later decades, you got the Orange Bowl first, the Rose Bowl in the afternoon and the Sugar Bowl at night, and all was right with the world.
But once the Bowl Championship Series began, the date of the bowl hosting the BCS championship game started to push into January — the 3rd or the 4th, depending on how the calendar fell. When the BCS broke off a separate national championship game, its date extended even deeper into January, to the 7th or 8th. And through the first years of the four-team CFP, the Monday of the first full week of the year became the de facto national championship date.
Now that day is left open, and guess who gobbled it right up — the NFL, which now slots the final game of its Wild Card Weekend on that Monday night. And that is a perfect encapsulation of the problem college football now faces.
The CFP is a wondrous bounty of football joy, game after game of (sometimes) thrilling football matchups that range from the unexpected to the sublime. The problem is that the expanded CFP now requires four weeks’ worth of games, not two, and fitting those games into the most crowded space of the year is no easy task.
College football is doing battle with four forces: the academic calendar, the holidays, tradition and the NFL. Each one of those individually would be manageable; together, they’ve forced college football into the awkward, extended limbo we see today.
The foundational reason why college football exists — the actual colleges — is the most often disregarded element of the entire superstructure. But there’s an academic cost to extending a season from nine games to 12 to the 16 that Notre Dame and Ohio State will play. Quaint as it sounds, that’s a massive disruption to the academic calendars for all students involved with the team — players, support staff, band, et cetera. Combine that with the holidays, and you can’t just barrel right on through December with games; some of them will end up falling on Christmas or Christmas Eve. (Don’t be surprised, though, if you see college football over the holidays eventually. Money has a way of sweeping aside family and academic objections.)
The CFP has done about as good a job as possible so far of incorporating tradition — i.e. the New Year’s Day bowls — into its framework, but that’s still a scheduling anchor that’s buried and immobile. More of concern is the NFL, which claims an increasingly large share of the weekends as January rolls on. And nobody’s moving the NFL. If anything, as the NBA discovered on Christmas, the NFL is coming for everything it can.
What can be done?
So that gets us where we are now, with the college football world already looking past the championship game instead of getting fired up for it. (We haven’t even touched on the insanity of opening up the transfer portal right in the middle of all this.) So what’s to be done to keep the momentum going and keep the college football season from getting spread far too thin?
It’s notable that for all the initial changes proposed for the CFP — re-seeding, automatic qualifiers, home sites — scheduling isn’t really in the conversation. It’s just too massive of a hurdle to clear at this point. Since there aren’t any more weekends being created, college football has to get creative with the ones it has.
The options, then, are fairly obvious: Start the season earlier, or take chunks out of the season as it 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 equally fraught — get rid of the conference championship games and all their attendant revenue, or start the playoff the same December weekend as the Army-Navy spotlight game, which would require some serious political stones to propose.
Regardless, change has to come. The college football season has been a thrilling one, and the playoff has delivered some of the best games of the year. It’s only right that in the future we give each season the crescendo to a sendoff it truly deserves.
Maybe then we can stop looking forward to next season before the current one is done.
