(04-27-2021 11:14 AM)Wedge Wrote:  

(04-27-2021 08:43 AM)ken d Wrote:  

(04-26-2021 10:54 AM)Wedge Wrote:  

(04-26-2021 09:07 AM)ken d Wrote:  A 16 team CFP is out of the question for any number of reasons. One obvious one is the length of the season, which would require either that you play through exams as if they didn't count, and/or you compete more directly with the NFL playoffs.

Neither ESPN nor any other network will pay big money for college playoff games that are played at the same time as NFL playoff games. No chance. The NFL's new schedule format occupies all of the Saturdays and Sundays in January, so those weekends are unavailable to the CFP.

And, you're right to assume that even the presidents of "football schools" will insist on continuing to pretend that final exams are more important to them than football money, so starting a playoff on the weekend after conference title games is out.

So, if the gatekeepers agree on an expanded CFP, it's going to be 8 teams, first round on the Saturday that is 7-13 days before January 1, semifinals on January 1, final on the Monday that is 7-13 days after January 1. That's the only schedule with a chance of significantly increasing TV revenue over the current CFP.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a change to the academic calendar, inspired by many schools' response to COVID, could alter our thinking here. Many schools decided to send students home at Thanksgiving, not to return until the Spring semester. What if they now recognize the wisdom of that and move up the start of the Fall semester to make that change permanent?

You want to have final exams end before Thanksgiving? You won't rule that out, but I will. Here's an example of how that would work. UC Berkeley's final exam period this fall will end on December 17th. If you end finals 4 weeks earlier, on the Friday before Thanksgiving, that means starting the fall semester 4 weeks earlier, on July 21st instead of August 18th. That's a major change, not a minor change.

Universities won't do that, because the revenue from tuition and room and board is gigantic, and it far outweighs the revenue from college football. A large public university in the "P5" will rake in over $1 billion/year in tuition, fees, and room/board, some of them more than $2 billion. A large private university like USC easily brings in over $2 billion/year from its students.

Universities are not going to risk disrupting those revenue streams by permanently starting their fall semester 4 weeks earlier.

What many schools did during COVID was to do away with Fall break and conduct exams online after students went home for Thanksgiving. And that sounds like a long semester to me at Berkeley. American U. finishes at the same time
but they don't start until 8/30 (and they do have a Fall break built in). Of course, I'm also remembering what it was like when I was in college, but we didn't have as much stuff to learn back then. A lot of it hadn't been invented or discovered yet.