Joel Klatt gives horrific review of College Football Playoff's new scheduling format

Fox Sports commentator and analyst Joel Klatt is not a fan of the College Football Playoff schedule for the 2024 season. Not even close.

The honest Klatt didn’t hold back either on The Joel Klatt Show on what he thought of the schedule, even if he admitted that organizers didn’t have any good options.

“Was it a good hand? No. It’s a bad hand. The semifinals are going to be on a Thursday and Friday, January 9 and 10, of wildcard weekend in the NFL. Barf. Yikes. That is a terrible hand to be dealt. Are they doing the best that they can? Yes. And then the championship game, again, this horrid idea of playing the championship game on a Monday is going to continue,” Klatt said on his podcast.

The schedule for the 2024 College Football Playoff starts with the first round games on Friday and Saturday, December 20 and December 21. The quarterfinals will be held over New Year’s at the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl, Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl, Rose Bowl Game and Allstate Sugar Bowl. New Year’s Eve is a Tuesday that year.

As Klatt mentioned, the semifinals will be the Capital One Orange Bowl on January 9 and the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic on January 10, or a Thursday and Friday.

“Let’s just back up for a moment,” Klatt said. “So we’re gonna play conference championships the first week of December, have this stupid break that we always have to have in college football for finals, which is the dumbest thing in the world, and we’re not going to play the first round until December 20 and 21st. Okay, fine. Then we’re going to play the quarterfinals on the traditional college football weekend day, if you want to call it, that New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Then we have to play our two most important rounds against the most powerful sports entity on the planet: The NFL playoffs — slow clap.”

Going up against the behemoth that is the NFL playoffs is not a winning battle, Klatt says, and holding the semifinals the same week as wildcard weekend, which features six NFL playoff games, won’t work out well for the sport.

“That week is going to be a lot of different things, including Black Monday in the NFL, and leading into wildcard weekend of the NFL playoffs,” Klatt said. Depending on the matchups you could be looking at the college football semifinals being the third best news story of the week. That’s a problem. That’s a problem. That’s a huge problem.”

The schedule for the 2025 season is the exact same other than the fact New Year’s Eve will be a Wednesday.

Klatt said he understands it wasn’t an easy situation for CFP organizers to deal with but he hopes this will push them to make changes come 2026.

“Could they do any better?” Klatt said. “I don’t know. Probably not. Because these first two years, they’ve got to be square peg round hole. Like is it going to be perfect? No. Did the did they do the best that they possibly could? Yes. Is this awful? Absolutely. This terrible. This is terrible. It speaks to the importance of why the playoff in ’26 and beyond has got to be fixed and not just fixed. That’s probably the wrong word. It needs to be constructed way better.”