Fixing College Football Part 3: The calendar
The calendar is nonsensical. Let's change that
College football is an interesting sport. One full of pageantry, tradition and anachronisms. Some for the better and some for worse.
The biggest of these anachronisms is the schools clinging to keeping college athletics tied to education. And that makes sense on the surface - they are, after all, sponsored by higher education institutions and made up of players that attend courses at that institution and maintain an academic eligibility. Players getting paid doesn’t change that, but it does draw the attention away from the student-athlete part and makes it more of just an athlete that happens to go to school.
You may not have noticed, but there’s been a conscious change in messaging here at SID Sports to move away from the student-athlete title and just label our players as “athletes.” Not to get too into the weeds, but I made that choice to better reflect the modern college athletics society. These are not amateur athletes anymore, at least in college football. They are paid like professionals, raking in thousands of dollars at even the lowest levels of the FBS.
Why am I talking about this change in messaging in a newsletter that’s supposed to be addressing the college football calendar? Because I’m about to make some claims that may be divisive for some: I’m basing this around the academic calendars.
Gasp! That’s right, I’m doubling down on that point. Are these athletes paid like professionals and, in almost every case, hoping to go pro in their sport rather than achieve a degree? High-academic schools like Harvard, Yale, Rice, and Stanford nonwithstanding, yes. But they are still getting an education and have to maintain academic eligibility.
I don’t think I’ve talked much about my personal life or professional life here, aside from my former SID career, but I work in higher education as an advisor to students. I strongly believe in the value of education and believe that everyone should have access to all levels of education (that’s an issue for a different time and different place). And I believe that athletes should have to maintain their academic requirements to work towards a degree.
That means we’re going to build this around the academic calendar and at least attempt to balance athletic and academic success here. It is, after all, still college athletics.
Gamedays
First off, we’re going to establish a few things. In my realignment piece, we talked about making the conferences make more sense based on historical rivalries, geography and things that just plain make sense. It also features 10-team conferences, meaning each team would play a nine-game round robin conference slate.
We’re keeping to the traditional 12-game season, so that means three non-conference games and nine in-conference games. While I tried to preserve some rivalries, there will be yearly battles between teams out-of-conference that would take up a non-conference slot like Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate (Georgia-Georgia Tech), El Assico (Iowa-Iowa State), the Florida Triangle of Hate (Florida-Florida State-Miami), and others.
I’ll also require that each team play an FCS opponent each year - but just one. Will that often notch a win for each of our 138 FBS programs? You bet, but it also lets some money trickle down to those smaller schools. These buy games - or body bag games, depending on who you ask - are essential to lower-level programs in balancing their budgets, oftentimes with a cool six-to-seven figure payout for one game. I’ll also implement traditional Power Four teams playing one traditional Group of Six team for similar budgetary reasons.
We also had the note from yesterday about (semi-)traditional bowl games replacing Week Zero/One non-conference matchups. In my eyes, these are neutral site games that are simply designed to be the best matchup it can be. No conference tie-ins and full autonomy for schools and bowls to come up with the wackiest, zaniest, most fun games possible.
With those three things in mind, let’s take a look at an example schedule for our reigning national champion, Indiana:
Conference Games: Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Purdue, Wisconsin
Buy Games: Illinois State (FCS), Northern Illinois (G6)
Week Zero/One Bowl: Penn State
Not a bad 12-game slate, is it? Sure, it’ll put strain on some of our independent schools, but most are located in the Eastern side of the country and can play each other each year. The service academies already do. Navy and Notre Dame have a longstanding series. Penn State hasn’t had to play schedule gymnastics too often, but a yearly game against Notre Dame and some fill-in options wouldn’t be too hard to find.
When?
Let’s take a second to recap what we’ve discussed so far across our two previous parts of this series. 1) Nine-game conference schedules in a round robin format, 2) 16-team playoff. That’s a bit of a departure from the normal calendar, so let’s get into it.
First, we’re moving the season’s start up a week to the current Week Zero. That means the last weekend in August is the first game of the season - oftentimes a week or two after students arrive on campus for their Fall semesters. The new “Week Zero” would be the second-to-last weekend in August for teams with major travel instances, like Hawaii and their home opponents. They deserve an extra bye week.
We’ll keep the duration of the regular season the same 15 weeks it is now, meaning the weekend before Thanksgiving is the end of the regular season.
Yes, it pains me to move rivalry up a week, as I feel like Thanksgiving Weekend is a perfect time for that. It’s a time of celebration and nothing is more celebratory than putting a smackdown on your season-closing rival. I choose to ignore that any other outcome can come from the game.
But, it also provides a bit of a benefit here. Namely, because Thanksgiving weekend sees all colleges closed and students on break. Not anymore, as campus will be packed for those rivalry matchups. Has the atmosphere at a Michigan-Ohio State, or a Clemson-South Carolina been lacking in the past? Absolutely not. But still, the packed campus without holiday-contingent travel nightmares should make the weekend smoother and allow the games to shine through.
For this upcoming year, that would mean that the season would start with Week Zero August 22 and the season would start in earnest August 29. November 21 would be the closing line of the regular season.
As is tradition, we’ll slot Army-Navy into Thanksgiving night, because nothing says American holiday weekend quite like supporting the troops in a triple-option slog on some cold, rainy NFL field.
So, moving to the postseason. As we’ve discussed in the postseason edition of this series, there are no conference championships due to the round-robin format, and the 24-team playoff will run five weeks.
Army-Navy won’t go head-to-head with the playoff, as the service academy battle is reserved for Thanksgiving night (the executive order being floated by President Trump to prevent other football games from going against Army-Navy, including the NFL, would help with this, provided it’s enforceable). But, the first round of the new playoff would commence the same weekend as Army-Navy. The eight top seeds would earn a much-needed bye, putting further emphasis on performing well in the regular season.
To recap, here’s how our season calendar would look for 2026:
August 22 - Week Zero Bowls
August 29 - Week One Bowls
November 21 - Rivalry Week and close of regular season
November 26 - Army-Navy (Thanksgiving Night)
November 28 - Round 1 of the CFP (Campus Sites)
December 5 - Round 2 of the CFP (Campus Sites)
December 12 - CFP Quarterfinals (Rotating Bowls)
December 19 - CFP Semifinals (Rotating Bowls)
January 1, 2027 - CFP Championship at the Rose Bowl
Championship teams get a bye heading into the CFP Title Bout, just like the NFL does for the Super Bowl participants. No, I’m not shoving in a CFB Pro Bowl because nobody cares about that just like nobody cares about the NFL’s Pro Bowl.
The Recruiting Calendar
Well, the season schedule worked out really well, didn’t it? Almost like it’s not hard to structure a season around an academic calendar (yes, I recognize it is, let me have this moment).
But now we get to the most polarizing topic - the portal. We’ll dive into the portal in full tomorrow, so we’ll just stick to the calendar here.
Ahead of the 2025 season, the NCAA moved to a single winter portal window that runs from January 2-16. For once, they made the right move. Well, the right move in a vaccuum.
Remember at the beginning of the post when I told you that lining up with the academic calendar and prioritizing education even a little bit isn’t a bad thing? It’s time to bring that back.
To be a full-time student eligible for athletic competition, players would have to maintain full-time enrollment for two of the three semesters. Yes, semesters. Get off the quarter system, Notre Dame. It doesn’t help anyone.
The Fall semester isn’t going to be impacted at all, because it’s almost in line with the new regular season I proposed. When do most semesters start? Late August or early September. When would the 2026 season start with this new calendar? August 22 for Week Zero - hopefully with home games at campuses already packed with students - and August 29 in earnest. Semesters are generally around 16 weeks long, which runs until - you guessed it - December 12ish.
With this new schedule, college football’s home seasons almost perfectly line up with a typical semester schedule. First round playoff games will have campus full of students and packed houses. It’s about time we prioritized the student experience a bit. The next week, which is often finals time, still has campus sites teeming with excited students ready to cheer off that nervous post-finals energy. Then, when the semester comes to a close and students head back to wherever they call home, the rotating bowls take over.
But this section header isn’t about that. It’s about the recruiting calendar. So, let’s look at recruiting with that academic calendar focus in mind.
Most Winter semesters will start around Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so the early to middle part of January. Guess when the transfer portal’s only window is? You’ve got it: January 2-16.
That’s a completely asinine schedule that leaves next to no time to even consider academics, let alone prioritize them. I work as an academic advisor in my real job. I spend my days helping students chart their academic success over their programs. I also look at transfer credits for incoming students. And boy is that a tight window to try to orchestrate a transfer.
Yes, paying players has made it easier without having to worry about financial aid-related hiccups. But you still have to consider what classes transfer, how the course schedule lines up with practices and games, what program you’re going into, and more. The current system makes that nearly impossible.
So, we move the transfer portal to the end of the Spring semester. Let’s say, May 1 as a general opening date with it closing May 15 to keep the window the same length of time.
That allows student athletes to actually take a semester’s load of classes. It can cut down on the amount of academic-related issues involved in transferring. It also helps give opportunities to incoming freshman recruits.
Those that were around in the aughts and 2010’s know the draw of the recruiting cycle. The ceremonies with a prospect raising their hats. The mixtapes. The pure aura - to borrow a word from the youngin’s - of what recruiting was in that era. I want to try to bring that back.
To do that, we’re keeping the high school recruiting window the same. Early Signing Day will come in early December. The first Wednesday in February will be National Signing Day. But only for high school prospects.
That gives us two main times where talent comes into programs and only one that leaves. Sounds simpler, right?
But, you may ask, what about Spring ball and camp? There’s been a lot of chatter about moving to a more NFL-style OTA camp instead of the current model. And frankly, that makes the most sense to me.
Remember, NCAA rules say you only have to be a full-time student for two semesters to be eligible to participate in athletics. For most athletes across all the schools I’ve worked at - five now - they take summers off. Why not have camp in the summer?
We can still have Spring ball and Spring camp for the high school early enrollees, just like the NFL has rookie minicamp. That should bring more of an emphasis on development that traditional fans have been craving, instead of folks like Cody Campbell opening their wallet and funding a playoff team.
The Calendar
With all of this said, the calendar would look like this for 2026:
December 5, 2025: Early Signing Day (2026 incoming HS recruits only)
February 4, 2026: National Signing Day (2026 incoming HS recruits only)
March-April: Schools determine freshman camps
May 1, 2026: Transfer Portal opens
May 15. 2026: Transfer Portal closes
June-July: Schools determine full-squad camps
August 22, 2026 - Week Zero Bowls
August 29, 2026 - Week One Bowls
November 21, 2026 - Rivalry Week and close of regular season
November 26, 2028 - Army-Navy (Thanksgiving Night)
November 28, 2026 - Round 1 of the CFP (Campus Sites)
December 5, 2026 - Round 3 of the CFP (Campus Sites)
December 12, 2026 - CFP Quarterfinals (Rotating Bowls)
December 19, 2026 - CFP Semifinals (Rotating Bowls)
January 1, 2027 - CFP Championship at the Rose Bowl
Does it fix all of our problems? No, of course not. There’s still overlap between Early Signing Day and the Playoff, after all. But come on, you can’t look at that and tell me that the current system is better than this.
If we pair this with the realignment from Part 1 of the series and postseason format in Part 2, I think we have an infinitely more interesting system than the NCAA is currently trotting out.
But, all this can only be achieved with the total overhaul we’ve been discussing. And, we’re not done.
Check this space tomorrow for how to fix the rule book.
Check out the rest of the Fixing College Football Series!
Part 3 - The Calendar
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