It doesn’t appear that ESPN’s presentation of the College Football Playoff will undergo many, if any, fundamental changes.
While those in sports media like Tony Kornheiser blasted the CFP and NFL scheduling competing games as “football on football crime,” there was a school of thought that perhaps the CFP would be open to moving games out of NFL windows.
CFP executive director Rich Clark shared that sentiment after scheduling two opening-round games against the NFL this postseason. Rather than clearing out for the NFL on the Saturday after conference championship weekend, the CFP opted to schedule two games in the slot long held by pro football.
The result? Predictable.
The NFL dominated.
Games on NBC and Fox pulled in over 15 million viewers, while the noon ET Penn State-SMU matchup on TNT barely managed 6 million.
ESPN’s decision to sublicense two games to TNT only deepened the CFP’s disadvantage. The playoff committee might have been smarter to schedule a Friday evening doubleheader, as the NFL suggested, and avoid direct competition with the pros.
That way, games could be spread out to avoid cannibalizing viewership.
But that’s merely just speculation, as Sports Business Journal reported that there was little — if any — appetite for change among the playoff committee.
Here’s more from SBJ.
ESPN presented viewership data to the CFP Management Committee before the championship game, and sources with knowledge of that presentation told SBJ that the general sentiment among the group was that there was no commitment to any substantive schedule changes in Year 2 of the expanded CFP.
Figures like Joel Klatt and Paul Finebaum have proposed to move the first round of the CFP up to Heisman week, which would coincide with the Army-Navy game, while moving America’s Game all the way up to opening week.
But as said before, there’s no inclination to make any wholesale changes for now.
In fact, SBJ noted that sources familiar with ESPN’s presentation suggested the first round CFP games on TNT actually cut into the NFL audience more than the NFL cut into the the first round CFP games. In other words, ESPN feels viewership for the two afternoon CFP games wasn’t as low as anticipated, even if the numbers may have indicated a different feeling.
For now, it seems the CFP is content to stay the course, at least when it comes to radical change. The door is still potentially open for alterations to the first-round schedule that could benefit the CFP and NFL. But for now, any suggestion that the first round could be moved up a week is firmly on the back burner.
