Oregon's Dan Lanning has an idea to fix the College Football Playoff: Get rid of byes

Yahoo

2 days ago

LAS VEGAS — There's a lot going on in college football these days.
There's a disagreement over the College Football Playoff format, debate over athlete compensation rules and uncertainty on the future of the transfer portal.
But if Dan Lanning could change one thing, it wouldn't be associated with any of that.
'College football season should end Jan. 1,' the Oregon head coach told Yahoo Sports in an interview from Big Ten media days on Wednesday. 'That solves a lot of the problems that exist.'
Shifting up the college football season — long a discussion point among college administrators — would result in what Lanning says will be a more condensed playoff, one spread across five weeks instead of seven, and one that does not, he said emphatically, include long byes for teams.
After last season, he's done with those. His No. 1-seeded Ducks had 25 days off before a 41-21 loss to eighth-seeded Ohio State in the quarterfinals.
'All four teams that had a bye lost. There's something to that,' Lanning said.
Lanning and three Oregon players spun through Day 2 of the three-day Big Ten football media days here on Wednesday as the defending conference champions and a team predicted to finish toward the top of the league again this year despite a host of departures and plenty of new faces (Oregon had 10 players drafted, including veteran quarterback Dillon Gabriel).
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The Gabriel-led 2024 version of the Ducks romped through last season undefeated, beating Ohio State in a thriller at home and knocking off Penn State in the conference title bout. And then, in a stunning display at the Rose Bowl, they fell behind 34-0 to the Buckeyes in the rematch.
While Ohio State was an 'unbelievable team,' Lanning said, it's pretty clear what happened. One team had a month off and the other had played the weekend before in the first round of the playoffs.
Perhaps long, extended off time isn't such a positive.
'You saw a team that wasn't resting and a team that was,' Lanning said. 'In the second half, we were a much different team, but it was too much to overcome. So if there's anything that I would change, it's playing these games faster and sooner. College football belongs on Saturday, not the NFL.'
Lanning's shot toward the NFL is a reminder of the growing animosity between those in college sports and the NFL, which continues to encroach on days traditionally reserved for college football. He's far from alone in this.
The NFL began long ago playing games on Thursdays, normally exclusively for colleges. Two years ago, they started to play on Black Friday, too. And starting the third Saturday in December, the league plays games on Saturdays in what's become a complication for college's new, expanded playoff. In fact, the two of the four first-round games competed with NFL games last December and both semifinals in January were scheduled on weekdays to avoid a head-to-head with NFL weekend playoff games.
'Look at Major League Baseball,' Maryland head coach Mike Locksley said. 'They spend $900 million on minor league baseball as a development league. The NFL is getting us for free. When I grew up, Thursday night used to be college football. Now it's two NFL games.'
But back to Lanning.
His idea of moving up college football's playing season is a long-discussed issue that may solve, as he says, several matters. Ideally, he believes college football should turn Week Zero into Week 1, shifting up the entire season by a week (conference championship games would presumably move to Thanksgiving weekend).
The playoff could begin on the first or second weekend of December, the national semifinals would fall on New Year's Day and the championship game would be back in early January instead of Jan. 20 as it was last year (it's Jan. 19 this season).
Conceivably, the first two rounds of the playoffs could be unencumbered — without competition from NFL games. And the postseason will mostly be completed by the time the new, single transfer portal period is established (the expectation for that is early to mid-January).
'It solves a lot, whether it's the portal being open during the season or what,' Lanning says. 'I just wish we played a similar playoff to every other model that exists in every other sport where you play every Saturday and you get knocked out. There might be byes, but it's not going to be more than 14 days off as opposed to what we had this past season.'
Not long ago, College Football Playoff leaders seriously discussed the prospect of shifting up by a week the entire regular season. In fact, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said two years ago that a Week Zero shift should be considered.
'I don't know that anybody's ready to say we can't do it or we can do it,' he said then.
However, since Phillips uttered those words, conversations around the prospect have faded. College leaders begrudgingly made the decision to take on the NFL head-to-head with those two first-round playoff games in December.
These weren't just any ho-hum NFL games. The 1 p.m. kickoff, on NBC, was the Texans versus the then two-time defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs and quarterback Patrick Mahomes. The 4:30 p.m. kickoff, on Fox, was one of the most attractive division rivalries of the last 20 years: Steelers vs. Ravens.
'They purposely scheduled aggressively against us,' one college football executive told Yahoo Sports then.
But moving up the entire season is no easy task.
There are long-term game contracts that would need adjusting, such as with venues for conference championship games. Normally played on the first weekend of December, title games would kick off Thanksgiving weekend to allow for, at very least, an agreed-upon 12-day period between the final league title game and the first playoff game.
There are plenty more hurdles, like convincing your primary network partner to go along with this. Over the last two years, ESPN executives have expressed to some CFP leaders their concern over how such a move would impact television windows around the holidays.
More than 50 FBS games are played during the Thanksgiving week, many of them drama-filled rivalry meetings, like Auburn-Alabama, Michigan-Ohio State and Florida State-Florida. These are rating giants on a holiday week, generating eye-popping figures. If the schedule is shifted up, Thanksgiving week would feature just nine games, and while all of them are conference championships, five of those involve only Group of Five programs.
That's not to mention the shifting of the traditional opening weekend, also built around a holiday (Labor Day). However, during Division I conference commissioner meetings last month in Asheville, N.C., administrators re-examined making Week Zero a permanent playing date for college football teams, but without moving up the entire season.
It would provide an additional bye week for teams. For now, schools wanting to play on Week Zero must be granted a waiver by NCAA governance committees.
Lanning would love to see that end, and for Week Zero to become Week 1, no more playoff byes and a postseason that ends before mid-January.
'If anyone ever asks me what's the one thing I could change in college football,' he said, 'it's always that.'