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The NFL is king when it comes to American sports. Sure, college football is particularly dominant in the south and there are few football fans who would turn away the opportunity to watch an expanded College Football Playoff.
With that said, Ross Dellenger of Sports Illustrated is reporting that some CFP officials are worried about going head-to-head with NFL games now that they’ve decided to expand the playoff. The NFL already leaks into Saturdays during the time period between college football’s final regular season game and bowl season.
Officials are reportedly worried, and for good reason, that the NFL could even hurt their viewership numbers for the CFP. That’s how big of a draw the NFL is.
“You’re just trying to minimize all the ways the NFL will f***you,” one official told Dellenger.
Specifically lamenting the fact that the NFL is now making a move on Black Friday, which has traditionally been a college football day, one conference commissioner reportedly had this to say:
“The NFL is squashing us. And now Black Friday? Where does it end?”
The four-team CFP is a major draw because of the exclusivity of the game. It’s a spectacle, and that’s why college football made the event just a four-team affair to start.
Expanding the playoff is exciting, but it also makes the non-semifinal games less “big” in a sense.
This isn’t the case for everyone, but if you had to choose between a late-season game between the Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers to determine the AFC South and a first-round playoff game between TCU and Oregon (for example)…wouldn’t the NFL win out nine times out of ten?
That’s what the “powers that be” in college football have to grapple with and figure out before CFP expansion can be a reality.
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