Army-Navy mulling schedule change as CFP expansion looms

The Army-Navy game has been a fixture of the weekend following the conference championship games for the better part of two decades. But with expansion to the College Football Playoff looking probable in the next couple of years, which would likely necessitate playing games on the day traditionally set aside for Army-Navy, the game’s stakeholders are taking a look at their options.

According to a report by Ben Portnoy in Sports Business Journal, administrators from both service academies “have held extremely early-stage discussions to map out what expanded playoff might mean for the game’s standalone space in the second week of December.”

The Army-Navy game is a key financial driver for both service academies’ athletic department budgets. CBS pays into the seven-figures annually for the game, and recently extended its media rights agreement to run through 2038. Per Portnoy, the game accounts for as much as 30% of Army and Navy’s annual athletic budgets. The game regularly draws high single-digit millions of viewers on CBS, partly due to its standalone window.

“It’s important for Army and Navy to have a standalone [window],” Army Superintendent Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland told SBJ. “The fact is, [Saturday], there’s other games on, but they’re in different time slots. We’ve got to try our best to protect that, but we also understand the reality of the College Football Playoffs with expansion and the second and third-order effects on conference championships, the regular season, and how that plays out.

“We can’t just say ‘Oh, we’re going to have our own game and our own day.’ We’ve got to be cognizant of that and, as a result, we have to be adaptable, too.”

There aren’t any obvious windows to put Army-Navy should the CFP encroach on the second weekend of December. Week 0 is a possibility, but there’s a likelihood that the regular season eventually moves up to begin that weekend. SBJ also mentions Thanksgiving weekend as a possibility, though there are already so many other games to compete with that weekend.

Whether the two academies will need to find an alternative for next season remains up in the air as conference commissioners have until mid-January to decide on an expanded CFP format. If no format is agreed upon, Army-Navy will be safe in its standalone window for at least another year.