New Years Eve Smacks College Football Playoff in Face

New Years Eve did not turn out to be the massive ratings win that the College Football Playoff was expecting.  Why they thought this was a good idea is a mystery to everyone but them.  Even ESPN knew it was not going to be a good thing for ratings and tried to get them to switch the games to Saturday.  The College Football Playoff told them they would not switch the times.  As it turned out for a change ESPN was correct.  Should they really get credit though for being correct on something everyone except for College Football knew?  I would say no.  I hate to give ESPN credit for getting anything right since they get so much wrong.  Maybe we should institute replay for ESPN…

How bad were the numbers for the CFP semi final games?  If the numbers had not been so amazingly good last year they actually would not have been crazy bad.  Since they were so good last year they look horrible.  They were down almost 38% from the numbers in the first year of the playoff.  Some of the drop could be attributed to the blow outs the games turned into.  Most of the drop is attributed to two major things.  The first thing is that half the country was still at work when the first game started.  The rest of it is attributed to it being New Years Eve and people had other things that they wanted to do.

Last year about 28 million viewers watched each of the two semi final games.  This year between the two games they averaged about 17 million viewers.    Than leaves 11 million viewers that were either doing something else like maybe work.  This number does not take into account the number of people that may have been streaming the games on their phone or tablet.    Since it is still relatively early in the life of streaming games it is difficult to judge how tuned in the streaming viewers are.  The could just be randomly checking the game and not actually watching the entire thing.

With the bad numbers will this make the people that run the College Football Playoff reconsider.  NO.  There are no signs that they will reconsider this any time soon.  The only times that the games will be on New Years day are when the Rose and Sugar Bowls are the host for those two games.  The contracts those games have say that they must be played on January 1st.  The College Football Playoff will not be willing to have the semi final games go up against those games.  So for at least the foreseeable future we are stuck with this happening.    The B1G/Pac 12 contract with the Rose Bowl goes till 2024.  An alternative for the CFP would be to move the games to January 2nd on the years that the Rose and Sugar Bowl do not host the games.  This is what ESPN wanted them to do this year and they flatly refused.  Saying that the people will watch anyway regardless of how inconsiderate we are being.  This year they guessed wrong.  As this goes on they may be right.  It is difficult to tell at this point.

At any rate this really will not affect the popularity of College Football.  If the games are exciting it may end up doing what they thought it would.  For now we are stuck with it.  Here is to hoping that they go to 8 teams soon.  Then everything will change again.