College Football Playoff continues to schedule semifinals on dates that don’t make sense

The College Football Playoff is looking to have the semifinals on New Year’s Eve again. That has not worked out well in the past.

We’re starting to get some schedule announcements for the upcoming college football season, including some updates and network assignments for select Ohio State games this fall.

As a part of all of that, we also got confirmation of when the College Football Playoff games and the rest of the New Year’s Six will be played. And, once again, despite comments when this whole thing was kicked off that New Year’s would once again be a staple of college football, it looks like the two semifinal matchups will once again take place on December 31 — New Year’s Eve.

That’s right. The Cotton and Orange Bowls that are in the rotation as the semifinals this year will both take place on a day that hasn’t historically be kind for ratings. On a day when everyone is having parties and get togethers to celebrate the New Year, there are just too many other things going on to expect viewers to tune in like they would the following day.

You don’t have to look very far to see the mistake having the two biggest bowl games of the year on New Year’s Eve have been from a ratings standpoint. There are of course several circumstances that could go into a viewer’s decision to tune in, but things did not go well in 2015. Our friends at Nittany Lions Wire have also touched on this subject and reported the following from the AP on New Year’s Day 2016, one day after the semifinal matchups.

The Orange Bowl between Clemson and Oklahoma, which kicked off about 4:10 p.m. EST on ESPN, drew a 9.1 rating, a 38.5 percent drop compared to last year’s Rose Bowl, which got a 14.8 rating. The number of viewers dropped 44.5 percent from 28,164,000 for the Rose to just 15,640,000 for the Orange.

The Michigan State-Alabama Cotton Bowl drew a 9.6 rating for ESPN compared to 15.2 for Ohio State-Alabama in the Sugar Bowl last Jan. 1 — a 36.8 percent drop. Total viewership crashed 34.4 percent, going from 28,271,000 to 18,552,000.

With such a ratings bonanza you would expect the semifinals to be on a yearly basis, you’d think the whole shell game of working with all the New Year’s Six games could work out to where the two most visible and noteworthy games would land on New Year’s Day.

Hey, maybe it’s something that can be cured with expansion? We can hope right?

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