Expanded College Football Playoff schedule for 2024, 2025 promises month-long frenzy

Let’s take a gander at what the expanded College Football Playoff schedule will look like soon.

Once the College Football Playoff expands from four teams to 12 in two years, expect for a month-long frenzy in the lead-up to the much-anticipated national title bout.

Going from four to 12 teams has been met with mostly positive reviews. Not everybody was on board with this rapid expansion, but it had to be done. This may water down the regular season a bit, which is the best thing college football has going for it, but putting an emphasis on winning conference championships should keep more teams engaged in their seasons until the bitter end.

The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach tweeted out what the 12-team College Football Playoff’s game schedule will look like once it is enacted in 2024, as well as for the following campaign in 2025.

2024 will have four on-campus, first-round games the weekend before Christmas. Your quarterfinals will be held around New Year’s with the Fiesta, Peach, Rose and Sugar Bowls all taking place. The national semifinals will be underway at the Cotton and Orange Bowls during weeknights. Atlanta will get to host the national championship at The Benz on Monday, Jan. 20.

2025 follows largely the same format as 2024. The first-round games are essentially identical, with the Cotton Bowl and Orange Bowl swapping out with the Fiesta and Peach Bowl in the quarterfinals/semifinals rotation. The 2025 national championship game will be played at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. Once again, the College Football Playoff nailed its two championship sites.

Let’s discuss the ramifications of all this now that we have the schedule in front of us, shall we?

Expanded College Football Playoff will be an excellent time for viewers at home

While the first-round home games, the New Year’s Six rotation and the 12-team format don’t really come as much of a surprise to those who have been paying close attention to what is going on at home, the two big things here are this: The decision to play first-round games up against NFL games on Saturday, but not during the NY6, as well as where the national titles will be held.

Home-site, first-round games should be played on mostly Saturdays, despite the NFL creeping into college football’s turf. We cannot reasonably expect for the NFL to back off when the former postseason schedule in college football allowed the shield free-reign to do whatever it wanted on Saturdays in that part of the year. Let’s just say I know what games I will be watching on Saturday.

Although we have grown accustomed to the national title bout being a standalone television property on Monday nights in January, we need to prepare ourselves for the New Year’s Six, or whatever we want to call these six games now, to happen mid-week. These are going to be neutral-site games, so they will be pretty corporate to begin with. However, this is the right call.

The reason I feel this way is college football cannot possibly hope to compete with the NFL playoffs. Even in a regular season that largely sucked last year in the NFL, we had a great postseason and built off that with an even better offseason. Though the College Football Playoff got two outstanding national semifinals, the championship game was completely one-sided.

Again, this is all about uncovering new and intriguing television windows. At that point of the year, there will be no Thursday Night Football or any derivative of that in the NFL. College football is great, but it has not always done the best job of carving out weekends where it does not have to compete with the NFL. This maneuver may blow up in their face, but I applaud the creativity here.

As for going with venues they know and trust to host national championships, such as Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta and Hard Rock Stadium just outside of Miami, the College Football Playoff seems to be done taking chances with cities hosting the event that aren’t going to make this a top priority. Non-NY6 cities like Indianapolis and Tampa will do it justice, but this is a firm stance here.

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