Playoff quandary: Is it smart to go head to head with NFL?

If a 12-team format is the future of the College Football Playoff — and odds are that it still is despite a recent detour on the road to expansion — among the many details that need to be worked out is when it would start.

There are two choices that will be considered by the administrators who make up the CFP management committee:

• Hold the first round the second weekend of December, which would create what some members of the committee believe is an unfair advantage for playoff teams that don’t play conference championship games while also bumping into what has become the traditional standalone date for the Army-Navy game. Or ...

• Play the third week of December and deal with the possibility of scheduling the playoff around or against NFL games.

“That’s part of what we’re trying to figure out, just the sequencing of when these games would be played and in what order,” Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner Jim Phillips told AP this week, adding that the safety of teams playing two high-stakes games in a row was a factor. “So we have to pay careful attention to that, not only the number of games, but how they are sequenced.”

Instead of moving forward on a 12-team model as many involved hoped would be the case by now, the committee is sorting through the pros and cons of an eight-team format.

With eight teams, there are no games that need to be played in mid-December, eliminating altogether those issues as well as conflicts with final exams at many schools, and making that number more appealing to some committee members.

Still, there are obstacles to eight that make expansion to 12 more likely.

Second week of December

The 12-team plan calls for the first four games to match seeds 5-12 on campus sites. The top four teams, all conference champions under the proposal, would have byes into the quarterfinals to be played on or near New Year’s Day.

At least two of those 5-12 seeds will be teams that have won conference championships. The plan calls for the six highestranked league champs to have automatic bids to the CFP. Some teams that lose conference championship games should also be expected to make the field.

Using previous final CFP rankings as an imperfect guide to how a 12-team playoff might have played out in the recent seasons, AP looked at the 2017-19 seasons. (Previous seasons were not used because the Big 12 was not playing a conference title game and 2020 was thrown out because the pandemic caused several conferences to have abbreviated seasons.)

In those three seasons, there would have been a total of five matchups between a team that played in a conference championship game and one that did not.

None of those hypothetical matchups involved Notre Dame, but the Fighting Irish are clearly on the minds of some members of the committee. Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick was part of the subcommittee that drew up the 12-team plan.

Under the proposal, independent Notre Dame would never get a first-round bye. Swarbrick has said that was a fair trade-off for Notre Dame never having to play on championship weekend. The Irish would always have a week off while most contenders are playing.

Then there is the ArmyNavy problem. The rivalry has been the only game scheduled to be played on the second Saturday of December since 2009, and those involved would like to keep it that way.

Moving Army-Navy back a week would then place it during what is now the first weekend of bowl season. It would also complicate matters if either is in position to qualify for the playoff.

Third week of December

Having the playoff on this weekend probably means a whole bunch of lower-tier bowl games would need to find another date.

Typically, bowl season starts on the third Saturday of December with several games mostly involving teams from non-Power Five conferences and, more recently, the FCS Celebration Bowl that acts as a de facto national title game for historically Black colleges.

The bigger potential obstacle is late-season NFL games. The league typically plays games on the final two Saturdays of December.

This year, because of the way the calendar breaks, there are no Saturday NFL games on the third weekend of December. But last year, there was. It’s one thing for ESPN to string together a handful of minor bowls to go up against the mighty NFL. It’s quite another to ask a television partner to pay hundreds of million of dollars for a new CFP and then expect that network to put it up against the NFL.