NFL vs. CFP: How Football’s Epic Saturday Slate Turned From Collaboration to Competition

The two most popular sports in America go directly against one another Saturday and while it’s euphoric for football lovers, the schedule also presents issues.

The NFL and the College Football Playoff will be in direct conflict this Saturday with five games across the two sports taking place across a matter of hours. / Jay Biggerstaff/Imagn Images and Maria Lysaker/Imagn Images

This Saturday will be unprecedented—and in a way not everyone will be happy with.

For the first time in what feels like forever the NFL and major college football are in intentional and direct conflict with one another. The first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff kicks off at noon ET, with SMU visiting Penn State. At 1 p.m., the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans kick off at Arrowhead. At 4 p.m., Clemson at Texas will get going. A half-hour after that, you’ll get Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Baltimore Ravens, with Ohio State–Tennessee next as a stand-alone nightcap.

First thought: That’s a lot of football, which is great.

Second thought: They could’ve done a lot better job than they did planning it.

Because of the length of some college games, the end of the two early ones could most certainly collide. The chances of that are even greater in the late-afternoon window. Which is to say everyone scheduled this stuff without regard to the other party involved—and that is incredibly short-sighted by all who are behind this.

This, to be clear, isn’t the NFL’s hostile capture of the flag the NBA planted decades ago on Christmas Day. Pro football and pro basketball are competitors for the sports consumer dollar. All’s fair in business. They have competing interests. They are competing. All good.

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Conversely, the NFL’s relationship to college football, a sport that’s risen to the point where it’s become America’s second most popular sport behind only its big football brother, is to be valued, not abused. The same goes the other way—the NFL’s success is good for college football. The pro league gets a free minor league, year-round promotion of its second-biggest event (the draft), and ready-made stars coming in who’ve been on national TV for years. The college ranks draft off the freight train of success the NFL has experienced.

They should be helping each other, at just about every turn.

In this case, there actually was an effort to do just that.

Before plans for the College Football Playoff were formalized last year, NFL officials had a series of clandestine meetings with CFP officials and conference commissioners. My understanding is the NFL took the lead in these meetings—but only to suggest ways that college football could work around its desires.

The NFL’s stance on this is simple. Part of the league’s antitrust exemption restricts it from playing games on Saturdays from the second Saturday in September through the second Saturday in December. As such, the NFL has routinely slated games for the third Saturday of December. Going back to 2000, and not counting this year, the NFL held games on this weekend in 20 of 24 seasons, including the past 10 years in a row.

The Ravens and the Steelers will meet again in an AFC North tilt beginning just 30 minutes after the Texas vs. Clemson game. / Barry Reeger-Imagn Images

Not looking to cede that real estate, the NFL suggested that college football play weeknight doubleheaders on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of this week. The college football folks responded that they weren’t going to jump into what many believed would be a black hole for television ratings. So the two sides left the table, with no real agreement, resolving to go about their business like the other didn’t exist—with one exception.

The NFL did vacate the prime-time Saturday window it had filled the past 10 years and in 20 of the past 22 years. The college football folks I talked to appreciated that. However, after murmurs that the NFL would stagger its kickoff times, setting them at, say, 2:30 and 5:30 p.m. ET, the league slotted itself right near the windows in which the earlier CFP games would be held, creating head-to-head competition.

Meanwhile, ESPN won the bidding for the CFP rights, something it didn’t fully anticipate happening. The Worldwide Leader believed, at the time, that the rights would likely be split up, so getting the whole slate of games wasn’t something their execs had budgeted for. With the rights, came the option to sublicense out games. And so when Turner, which was in the process of losing its NBA rights, showed desire to get into the CFP fray, it found a willing seller in ESPN, and a deal was struck to split the four first-round games.

ESPN gave TNT the two games that’ll be head-to-head with the NFL, then grabbed the two biggest national brands of the first round teams—Ohio State and Notre Dame—for the Friday and Saturday prime-time slots. Which is a good indication of how ESPN thinks the NFL will affect the CFP’s ratings.

It’s also an indication that this isn’t the right thing for the football fan who wants to take in all the action, but will be forced to channel surf on Saturday.

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I talked to retiring CFP executive director Bill Hancock on Wednesday night about all this, and he agreed that it would be best for everyone on the two levels of the sport to work together from here on out. The fans. The NFL. And college football too.

“The 12-team playoff is going to be really good for college football,” Hancock says. “And Saturday will be one of the most exciting days in the history of college football.”

He’s right, of course.

But at the same time, in order to facilitate the league’s desire to push (and sell) the new Christmas broadcast window, since Christmas is on a Wednesday this year, Patrick Mahomes, T.J. Watt, Lamar Jackson and C.J. Stroud will keep some fans from seeing it—because they’ll have to make that choice.

So how does this get solved?

One solution that was floated in the meetings between the sides was the idea that college football could move the start of its season up a week, to the weekend before Labor Day. The trouble, then, is teams playing in the heat of the South in August and moving rivalry weekend, a ratings bonanza for college football, off of Thanksgiving weekend, with the conference title games taking over that slot.

Another was the idea that college football could simply play the games during Army-Navy weekend. The trouble with that, of course, would be the question of what might happen if either of the service academies made the CFP—a proposition that was actually in play this year with Army. Then, there’s the idea of moving Army-Navy off its standalone weekend, which would likely be a nonstarter for a lot of folks.

At any rate, it’s going to take some creativity, with college football so protective of its traditions and the NFL just as aggressive in creating and monetizing broadcast windows.

As one NFC team president texted, as good as college football may be for the league in the long run, to owners, “creating more television windows that networks will pay for is way more important than creating draft interest.”

In the end, though, both sides are chasing money here.

It’d help everyone, of course, if they’d put that aside for a minute or two, and tried to figure out exactly what’s best for all of us who’ll be glued to everything Saturday. In the long run, it may even be the best thing for everyone business-wise, too.

Either way, I can’t wait for Saturday. Even if I know that, clearly, it could be even better.

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