3 drastic ideas to fix college football’s Playoff, calendar, and transfer system
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Let’s start here: I’m not someone who thinks college football is falling apart.
However, there’s clearly room for improvement in a sport that is still reeling from the seismic shifts that have taken place over the last half-decade. Issues such as player compensation and the configuration of the college football calendar will be the focus of this piece.
As an aside before diving in, I’ll note that this piece will strive to be as realistic as possible with its ideas (although much of what’s discussed below has surely been brought up by others at one time or another).
That means no promotion/relegation pitches (it’s not happening in this or any lifetime). There will also be no talk of 5-year eligibility rules (which I support) or super leagues (which I despise). I’m also not interested in forcing the Group-of-5 into their own playoff system nor do I care to demand collective bargaining (though it would solve a lot of issues if it were deemed possible).
Structural problems facing college football
With that out of the way, here are 3 drastic ideas that, in conjunction with one another, would help solve many of college football’s most high-profile issues.
Aligning conference championship weekend with the College Football Playoff
Conference championship weekend, as currently constructed, is broken. It’s clear there are little-to-no CFP stakes for the loser — as we saw in 2024 with SMU remaining in the 12-team field and Alabama moving up in the rankings this year after an embarrassing performance against Georgia.
If we eventually move to a 16-team Playoff — which I view as inevitable — there won’t be any CFP-related stakes for the winners, either. There won’t be a first-round bye to play for. The result is a complete misalignment of incentives for CFP contenders who are conference title game participants.
To fix this, I propose a conference championship bonanza across all of the Power 4 leagues. Here’s how it would work: The No. 1 and No. 2 seeds would still face off in the conference title game. But on that same weekend, each conference would have 2 additional games: the No. 3 seed vs. the No. 6 seed and the No. 4 seed vs. the No. 5 seed.
Imagine a weekend this season where Ole Miss played Texas in Oxford and Oklahoma played Texas A&M in College Station. The Longhorns would have been playing for their spot in a 16-team field. The Rebels, Aggies and Sooners all would have been playing for home-field advantage in Round 1.
These games would not serve as an official play-in to the College Football Playoff. Instead, they would provide good-but-flawed teams the opportunity to earn a résumé-boosting win. Fans get treated to intense, high-stakes games. TV networks get the spoils. Everyone wins.
One major caveat would be needed to make this work. It would need to be a stated and transparent rule that any program that does not play on this weekend is ineligible for CFP selection. This shouldn’t be too much of a sticking point — how many seventh-place teams will ever have a chance to earn a CFP bid? Opting out of this weekend can’t be an “advantage,” or the stakes fall apart. Similarly, a team that doesn’t play on this weekend but makes the CFP would have additional rest — it’s important that everyone is on equal footing.
What about the Notre Dame independence problem? I’d imagine the ACC would be more than willing to give up one of its 6 conference championship weekend spots in exchange for a cut of the Irish’s CFP payout. Keep in mind that the ACC would also have the broadcasting rights to a Notre Dame postseason game in this scenario. They could work something out.
That leaves 24 power-conference teams plus Notre Dame (in some years) plus any serious Group-of-6 contenders available for CFP selection. The Group-of-6 conferences could stage similar weekends, but I’d imagine it would be more fruitful for them to stick with a traditional conference championship format (the third-best team in a non-power conference has virtually 0 Playoff hopes regardless of who it could beat in a 13th game).
One more caveat — no auto-bids for any conference aside from conference champions.
Fixing the college football calendar
The college football calendar seems to be the biggest issue facing the sport right now. The coaching carousel interfering with the College Football Playoff to the degree that it did this season is untenable. The timing of the transfer portal is also a borderline disaster every December for college coaches and programs. We can fix it.
I subscribe to the Dan Lanning method, which calls for college football to be played every Saturday through the end of the season. I’d offer a small tweak and say that the week of Christmas should be removed from the equation. For one, the years in which Christmas falls on a Saturday would be a non-starter for TV networks. Additionally, having an open date on Christmas allows for the National Championship Game to always be played on New Year’s Day.
Here’s what a sample calendar would look like using 2026 dates:
- Aug. 29: Week 1
- Sept. 5: Week 2
- Sept. 12: Week 3
- Sept. 19: Week 4
- Sept. 26: Week 5
- Oct. 3: Week 6
- Oct. 10: Week 7
- Oct. 17: Week 8
- Oct. 24: Week 9
- Oct. 31: Week 10
- Nov. 7: Week 11
- Nov. 14: Week 12
- Nov. 21: Week 13
- Nov. 28: Conference Championship Weekend
- Dec. 5: CFP Round of 16
- Dec. 12: CFP quarterfinals
- Dec. 19: CFP semifinals
- Dec. 26: Open date
- Jan. 1: National Championship
Occasionally, there are 14 Saturdays between Labor Day weekend and Thanksgiving Weekend, necessitating a second open date for every team during the regular season. In those years, I’d propose 1 of 2 options. If Christmas falls in the middle of the week, then simply play the semifinals the weekend after Christmas and push the National Championship Game to the following Saturday (and not on New Year’s Day). Alternatively, the season could start during Week Negative 1 (for lack of a better term). Southern programs who deal with brutal summer conditions in mid-August will have plenty of notice to schedule road games in more climactically friendly locales.
One acknowledgment of this plan — rivalry weekend would no longer take place on Thanksgiving weekend. That’s certainly a loss and perhaps something that would not be acceptable. One potential solution, if deemed necessary, would be to move up the start of the season by another week and give every team 2 open dates. In a similar vein, this calendar would obviously impact Army/Navy. That game would no longer have a Saturday all to itself, but could have its own time slot. Traditionally, that game is played during the second Saturday in December. That could still be the case, although things would obviously get tricky either program happened to advance that far in the Playoff. I’d propose moving that game to the final weekend of the regular season — again, in its own, protected time slot — but there’s no perfect answer to problems like this that are laden with decades of tradition.
A key feature of this plan is that the transfer portal could conceivably open as soon as the Monday after the CFP semifinals. The season would be over for all but 2 teams. It would still be an inconvenient time for those programs, but it would be a much cleaner transition for everyone else.
In-season tampering would go down with this model, I suspect. Currently, tampering is rampant because there’s such a small amount of time between when the portal opens and when players need to be enrolled at their next program in order to begin classes for the spring semester. If the portal opens before Christmas — with only 2 programs still playing football in the current season — then tampering is no longer necessary. Enforcement of any tampering that does occur becomes realistic.
As part of this plan, I would also suggest moving the high school signing period back to February where it was for many, many years. The Early Signing Period taking place in mid-December has sped up the coaching carousel to an absurd degree. It’s now virtually impossible to allow your coach to finish the season if you plan to fire him. If you do, you risk losing an entire signing class of high school recruits. If college football returns to a February model, then the coaching carousel could play out naturally during the month of December before the portal opens just before Christmas.
Transfer fees
There’s an easy way to help ensure that the lower-and-middle class of college football doesn’t get left in the dust by blue bloods who have the ability to drop $40 million on a roster every year.
In European soccer, when a player gets moved to a new team, it comes with a transfer fee that gets paid to the player’s former club (unless the player has an expired contract and is a free agent). These payments, often from big clubs to smaller clubs, represent massive revenue streams. Clubs like Ajax in the Eredivise or even Dortmund in the Bundesliga have built identities around competing at high levels in their respective leagues while knowing that their best players are likely not far from a lucrative move to the Premier League or a mega club like Bayern Munich or Real Madrid.
This doesn’t happen in college football. When Mizzou signs Ahmad Hardy out of the transfer portal, Louisiana-Monroe gets nothing.
How would the fee structure work? In a perfect world, we’d have transparency on what each player is making both in NIL and in rev-share compensation. That’s not the world we currently live in, but something like that would probably be a prerequisite or any sort of transfer fee setup. I’d advocate for a flat rate of 5 or 10 percent of a player’s total compensation being paid to the athletic department of the player’s former program. That would allow for players to retain control of their own careers while also giving teams a lifeline for when they lose a star player.
Of course, there will be exceptions to this. If players eventually have multi-year contracts that they fulfill while having eligibility remaining, it stands to reason they should be able to transfer for “free.” An argument could also be made that the transfer fee should be different if a player is moving from within the same conference (i.e. Oklahoma to Georgia) as opposed to from a small school to a big school (i.e ULM to Mizzou). It would admittedly be tricky to find a fair and legal way to make those sorts of distinctions. But I think the downstream positives for all levels of the sport would make a good-faith effort worthwhile.
One way this could work is if “buyouts” are part of the contracts that players sign with schools when they join out of high school or via the portal. Of course, these buyouts would need to cut both ways. If a team gives up on a former top recruit who will be forced to transfer down a level, they would pay some sort of early termination fee. In those cases, the player’s next program would not be on the hook for any sort of fee to his prior school.
Another potential positive from this sort of structure is I believe it would result in fewer transfers overall. Would Texas still go after Cam Coleman if it knew it would have to write a $400,000 check to a conference foe? Would ULM have gotten another season out of Ahmad Hardy if he had a 6-figure buyout attached to his contract?
I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect collective bargaining would be a prerequisite for any sort of transfer fee structure. That’s certainly going to be difficult (players have tried and failed to unionize before), but not impossible. There is legitimate support from college administrators for collective bargaining with college football players. Even if a transfer fee structure is not on the immediate horizon, the sport is clearly moving in a direction that would benefit from this setup.
Spenser is a news editor for Saturday Down South and covers college football across all Saturday Football brands.
