Expanded College Football Playoff's biggest challenge? NFL's 'manifest destiny' strategy

Still six months away, it’s time to circle Dec. 21 on your calendars.

With a College Football Playoff opening-round tripleheader on tap, you’ll have a front-row seat for the newly expanded 12-team event as well as another showdown that figures to be a lopsided affair: the emerging winter battle for eyeballs between the CFP and the NFL.

As thriving college football – fresh off its most-watched season across all networks – stages its inaugural expanded tournament, it carries the unenviable burden of trying to schedule against the NFL. And it comes at a time when Roger Goodell has shown no hesitation in flexing the league’s considerable muscle to demolish everything in its programming path.

“The NFL has a manifest destiny media strategy,” John Kosner, who led digital media at ESPN from 2003-2017 and is president of media consulting firm Kosner Media, told On3. The CFP’s task in scheduling against the NFL, he said, is “super challenging” but “this is the world going forward.”

Can College Football Playoffs compete against NFL?

As other leagues have learned, viewership battles with the NFL are almost always one-sided, with Goodell’s behemoth demonstrating it is the proverbial hammer while all other sports play the role of the nail. Last year, 93 of America’s top 100 most-watched broadcasts were NFL games.

“Everybody moves to get out of the way of the NFL,” Neal Pilson, who served two stints as CBS Sports president in the 1980s and ’90s, told On3. “The colleges made the choice to go to a larger playoff, and in so doing were well aware that they may end up competing with NFL football … 

“It is business [by the NFL]. It’s not a strategy to drive anyone out of business. ‘Oh, the NFL is walking all over us.’ No, they are just looking for dates. If you happen to be scheduled on that date, you either move or you compete.”

The NFL lobbied the CFP to avoid staging all three games on Saturday, Dec. 21, according to Puck, and instead play two games on Friday (Dec. 20) and two on Saturday. The CFP chose otherwise. 

So, there will be one opening-round CFP game that Friday and Saturday evening, both broadcast on ABC/ESPN. The two Saturday afternoon CFP games will be televised on TNT, going directly up against two marquee NFL games – the Houston Texans-Kansas City Chiefs and the Pittsburgh Steelers-Baltimore Ravens – on network TV, NBC and Fox, respectively.

Not a normal strategy

Jon Lewis, owner of SportsMedia Watch, told Pac-12 insider Jon Wilner, “The decision to put two games opposite the College Football Playoff on NBC and Fox – that’s not normal.”

The NFL’s strategy is certainly not unique to the CFP. It is sucking up more oxygen in the sporting world throughout the fall and winter – and it is doing so because of the nation’s enormous appetite for its product.

The NFL last year began playing on Black Friday, which opposes a traditional college football window on the Friday after Thanksgiving. 

It is increasingly encroaching into Christmas Day – even on a Wednesday this coming December – creating a threat for the NBA, which long considered the day its own. And if an 18-game NFL schedule is our destiny – it is widely viewed as an inevitability – the Super Bowl could eventually impact NBA All-Star Weekend and the Daytona 500.

This December, the curtain will rise on the expanded CFP with much fanfare. But the challenge of scheduling against the NFL, now and in the future, remains formidable.

College football could start the bulk of its season one week earlier with a full Week Zero slate but otherwise doesn’t have a ton of wiggle room. And the NFL will steamroll anything in its programming path in its quest for eyeballs – even if that means stepping on the sport that supplies its future employees.

“I think that the NFL has its own strategy, and it is moving forward with that,” Kosner said. “And everybody else is going to have to move.”