The New-Look CFP Has New Dates: 2024 Playoff to Start Earlier in December

Commissioners determined preliminary dates for the additional Playoff games of the expanded College Football Playoff, voting to hold first-round games that conflict with the NFL and semifinals on midweek nights. CFP executive director Bill Hancock confirmed the dates during an interview with reporters following the final day of commissioner meetings this week in the Dallas suburb.

In the 2024 Playoff, the first-round games, played at the home site of the better seed, will kick off the third week of December. One game will be played Friday night, Dec. 20, and three games Saturday, Dec. 21. The NFL begins playing Saturday regular-season games that weekend.

Three of the four quarterfinals are slated for New Year’s Day with one quarterfinal scheduled on New Year’s Eve (a Tuesday night) or Jan. 2. None of them conflict with NFL games. The 2024 semifinals are scheduled to be played on a midweek day, Hancock says. That would presumably be Thursday and/or Friday, Jan. 9–10, in an effort to avoid the NFL’s wild-card weekend, which begins that Saturday.

The 2024 championship game will be held Jan. 20, 2025, Hancock says.

Though now official, the dates were not unexpected. Commissioners zeroed in on the dates during deliberations in October.

Three Playoff games are being played on midweek days, presumably to avoid conflict with the NFL. However, it was an impossible task for a portion of the first round, which will see college games go head-to-head against its big brother.

The NFL’s schedule has been a significant talking point for commissioners. The pro league’s schedule continues to encroach into traditional college football territory, as the NFL expanded its own playoff to create an additional wild-card game and started to dominate Thursday nights with their streaming package on Amazon. Its latest move came in the fall, when the NFL announced it would begin playing games on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that has for years belonged to college football.

All of it had college football executives stewing as they attempted to schedule eight additional games in an expanded Playoff while trying to avoid going head-to-head with America’s No. 1 sport.

“You’re just trying to minimize all the ways the NFL will f--- you,” one top CFP official told Sports Illustrated last fall.

Earlier this week, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey held a more measured view of the potential conflicts with the pro league.

“I fully respect the NFL and its model,” he said. “If we intersect, so be it. It’s not meant to be anything at all disrespectful or frustrating. They’ve expanded their season. The question about how to design our season ... part of that has to be thinking about where we fit around the NFL.”

Sankey said he’s “not had much” dialogue with NFL executives about the scheduling conflicts. Hancock seemed to suggest other CFP officials have had conversations with the league.

“I wouldn’t want to share any details about our conversations with the NFL,” he said, “but we have a good relationship with them.”

But there were other issues to ponder outside of the NFL, including arranging the schedule around things like college graduations and final exams. All of this unfolds amid coaching transitions, the early signing period and the transfer portal opening.

“There’s a lot there,” Sankey said.

The tight and busy window is why some officials believe the entire regular schedule should be moved up by a week, turning Week Zero into Week 1—a move that would push conference title games to Thanksgiving weekend. The shift is expected to be explored going forward, officials say, and could result in reducing conflicts with the NFL. If the CFP schedule moves up a week, the first round could be played the second week of December without NFL conflicts, and the semifinals could be played on New Year’s Day.

“We have to continue to consider Week Zero in my view,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said Thursday. “I don’t know that anybody’s ready to say we can’t do it or we can do it.”

The broadcasting rights for the 2024 and ’25 Playoffs, while discussed this week, were not resolved over the course of about 20 hours of meetings Tuesday through Thursday. ESPN owns the broadcasting rights for the final two years of the contract with the CFP, in 2024 and ’25. Thus, the network controls the timeline on a future media rights deal (you’ve got to get ’24–25 rights complete before moving to a new deal in ’26).

ESPN would seem to have two choices: (1) Televise all 11 CFP games in 2024–25, or (2) allow a second media outlet to bid on part of the package. But there might be a third option: Leverage their ownership of ’24–25 into having a significant piece of the package for ’26 and beyond. The two additional years of expansion are valued at an extra $450 million, according to the contract. But an expanded Playoff in an open market could fetch as much as three times the current value of the four-team event (about $600 million).

The idea that the CFP would not take its lucrative 11-game, 12-team Playoff to a bidding market would be somewhat preposterous and would receive pushback from many inside the CFP room. Several conference officials, most notably from the Pac-12 and Big Ten, have publicly expressed their desire for an expanded Playoff to have multiple broadcasting partners like the NFL.

Hancock acknowledged last fall the “need” to speak with multiple networks in the next broadcasting rights deal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean multiple networks will have a stake in a new deal.

“We all said for [2026] we would fully go to market with the media rights. What that conveyed is that everybody will have an opportunity to participate,” SEC commissioner Sankey said last fall. “We were always going to market. There’s no guarantee we’d go with multiple media partners. That’s a possibility, but we have to see the actual proposals.”

The current fractured state of college athletics is lingering above all of it. The latest wave of conference realignment provided evidence of the ongoing battle between the two biggest sports networks for college football properties, ESPN and Fox Sports. After the SEC signed a long-term broadcast rights deal exclusively with ESPN, the Big Ten last year agreed to an ESPN-less deal with Fox Sports as its main rightsholder.