In the morning leading up to last year’s national championship game, ESPN executives met in Dallas with Bill Hancock, the executive director of the College Football Playoff, to make a sensible proposal.
With an eye toward this year’s postseason, ESPN asked that the semifinals be moved from New Year’s Eve to Jan. 2, a Saturday, that would offer a potentially big audience.
The rationale was one that any big-spending, ratings-hungry network would endorse: viewership would suffer if the games were played on a weeknight when many fans are working and celebrating.
“They came to us and said, ‘We know what we bid on, we knew the dates, we understand all this, but next year, can we move the games from Thursday to Saturday?’” Hancock recalled by telephone Tuesday. But the conference commissioners who make up the Playoff’s management committee rejected the network’s request for temporary television sanity so they could preserve what they had already built: a New Year’s Eve-New Year’s Day block of six bowls, including the semifinal games between Clemson and Oklahoma (in the Orange Bowl), and Alabama and Michigan State (in the Cotton Bowl).
“It was really about sticking to what we had announced,” said Larry Scott, the Pacific-12 Conference commissioner.
By sticking to the plan, the Playoff folks got a New Year’s Eve flop: a 40 percent tumble in the audience for the semifinals compared with the comparable games played on viewer-friendlier Jan. 1, 2015.
It can be reasonably argued that the viewership was affected by factors unrelated to the day it was played: two games that turned into blowouts; two universities, Clemson and Michigan State, that are not national forces among viewers, and the playoffs’ lack of novelty in their second season after making their debut before an average of just over 28 million viewers.
“Everyone went in with their eyes wide open that the semifinals on New Year’s Eve do not have the same population watching TV as New Year’s Day,” Scott said.
Hancock sees no reason to change the scheduling of the Playoff, which, over the next 10 years, will feature seven more pairs of semifinals on New Year’s Eve, five of them on weeknights.
“You don’t make a decision based on one year — one year doesn’t make a trend,” he said.
There is a touch of absurdity to this — knowing in the creation of the new Playoff that New Year’s Eve has a tradition all its own yet trying to buck it almost every year through 2026.
Hancock focused on the 13 percent drop in overnight ratings for all six bowls on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day rather than the big drop for the semifinals alone.
Hancock listed his “measurables” for the success of the six bowls and the national championship game, which will be played Monday in Glendale, Arizona.
“That people have an experience they will remember the rest of their lives — the players, the coaches, the band members and the fans — and whether we provided the proper competitive experience for a team to win the national championship,” he said.
Much of that is what bowl executives, conference commissioners and college officials reflexively say about the postseason experience, regardless of the importance of the bowl.
Then Hancock added: “We don’t make decisions based on television numbers. I don’t have a TV number that influences my measurable for success.”
Yet, television numbers — and advertising sales and digital viewing — are how ESPN measures success. So Hancock’s view must seem almost heretical to ESPN, which declined to comment.
Hancock and the commissioners did not assemble this scheduling on a whim. It is hindered by the power of the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl. The Rose Bowl has long been guaranteed its Jan. 1 afternoon slot; the Sugar Bowl got the guarantee as part of the new playoff system. Last year, the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl were the sites of the semifinals, which worked out well, but they will host them only three more times through 2026, in a rotation with the Orange, Fiesta, Cotton and Peach Bowls.
The Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl are not obliged to move from Jan. 1, but will shift to Jan. 2 next year to avoid facing the NFL on the final day of its regular season.
“All of us in college sports have to find a sweet spot to recognize and honor tradition while doing what’s best for the game,” Hancock said. “We created a playoff — probably the most significant new initiative in college football in my lifetime — but built it around the tradition of the bowl games. And we did hit the sweet spot.”
Well, the sweet spot turned a bit sour last week when Stanford trounced Iowa in the Rose Bowl. The audience for “the granddaddy of them all” was cut in more than half from the previous year to 13.55 million — the fewest viewers for the game in at least a quarter-century, according to Nielsen.
