Armour: Semis get short shrift on New Year’s Eve,
Scheduling on New Year’s Eve does disservice
Timing, the saying goes, is everything. And the College Football Playoff ’s is terrible, no matter how hard organizers try to spin it.
The semifinals — you know, the games that decide who plays for the national title — should be the showcase on the day that has become synonymous with college football. Instead, the powers-that-be at the Playoff kowtowed to the Rose and Sugar Bowls and exiled the semifinals to New Year’s Eve.
The Orange Bowl, the first of this year’s semifinals and the one featuring top-seeded Clemson, kicks off at 4 p.m. ET Thursday, which is 1 p.m. Pacific. That’s smack dab in the middle of the afternoon on a day when some people have to work.
The Cotton Bowl, this year’s other semifinal, gets underway at 8 p.m. Eastern — prime time to screw up dinner and party plans for the other half of the country.
The Rose and Sugar Bowls, meanwhile, get to keep their usual places of honor on New Year’s Day, when few people have any interest — or energy — in doing anything besides parking them- selves on the couch or a bar stool and watching TV for hours on end. Preferably with several bags of chips and a greasy hamburger nearby.
“Some things you can control, and some things you can’t,” Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio said Wednesday. “Doesn’t make any difference when we’re playing as far as I’m concerned.”
But it does to the millions of people watching. Or would be watching if they didn’t have other plans.
Stewart Mandel, the college football writer for Fox Sports, asked his Twitter followers this month if New Year’s Eve plans would prevent them from watching one or both of the semifinals. Of the 5,443 people who responded, 35% said yes.
Now, the poll was informal and unscientific. But 35%, in a group that likely is your target audience, is not insignificant.
The fans aren’t the priority for Playoff organizers, though. The Southeastern Conference, Big 12, Big Ten and Pac-12 are.
See, those four leagues, along with the Atlantic Coast Conference and Notre Dame, are the main players in the Playoff. It’s in the best interests of organizers to keep them happy, lest they decide to take their teams and go home.
Not that that would ever happen. The Playoff has proved too popular — and lucrative — in its first two years, and no athletics director or university president is willingly going to give up that much cash. Not if he or she wants to keep his or her job, anyway.
Still, Playoff organizers don’t want to rock the boat. So when the Big Ten and Pac-12 said they wanted the Rose Bowl to be played on New Year’s Day afternoon even in the years it doesn’t host a semifinal, Playoff organizers said OK.
“We just didn’t want to end that tradition. It’s been a tradition for 100 years, and we just didn’t think it was necessary to change it,” said Bill Hancock, the Playoff ’s executive director.
Ah, yes. Tradition. It’s so sacred that the Big Ten now includes Nebraska, Maryland and Rutgers while landlocked Utah and Colorado are members of the Pac-12. But I digress.
Protecting the Rose Bowl didn’t mean the semifinals had to be shuffled off to oblivion. I mean, New Year’s Eve. One could have been played before the Rose Bowl and one after, and everyone — fans, sponsors, ESPN — would have been ecstatic.
Everyone, that is, except the SEC and Big 12, which said they wanted the Sugar Bowl locked in as the evening game on New Year’s Day.
Once Playoff organizers gave in on that, the semifinals became the bowl equivalent of orphan stepchildren.
ESPN did make a plea to push this year’s semifinals back to Jan. 2 since it falls on a Saturday, but that was rejected because Playoff organizers thought it was better to rip the Band-Aid off.
“These decisions are not easy and they don’t come simply,” Hancock said. “We’re starting a new tradition. Why delay it for one year? It’s going to happen anyway, so let’s go ahead and start it.”
Hancock tries to put a good face on the move, saying the combined ratings for the two days will be higher because the semifinals will generate more interest than previous New Year’s Eve games.
But it doesn’t change the fact that, only two years into the Playoff, the semifinals have been marked down like holiday knockoffs.
The semifinals are two of the biggest games of the entire college football season, topped only by the title game. They should command attention, not be forced to compete for it.