If there’s one thing everyone in college football can agree upon, it is this: The sport’s calendar is broken.
You have what is essentially player free agency taking place while the College Football Playoff is underway. Coaches are changing jobs but pulling double duty to finish out the season where they started while trying to make sure that they have some talent on their rosters for next year. And, of course, there’s all that portal drama overshadowing the most meaningful postseason games.
Two rounds of NFL playoff games will take place between the CFP semifinal games and the late-January national championship game, which makes it hard for the sport to sustain momentum. This year’s title game will be played on Jan. 19. Next year’s is even later — Jan. 25. That’ll be nearly two months of postseason games spread out.
“Whether it’s the NFL, whether it’s FCS football, whether it’s Division II football, March Madness, there are not those long breaks in between games,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said. “That’s somewhere we messed up.”
Lanning is among the coaches who have expressed ideas about how to fix the calendar to help the sport find even more eyeballs, better team performances and a more pragmatic schedule for coaches in 2026 and beyond. He’s certainly not alone in his complaints about the current system, either. Talk to any head coach in college football right now, and you’ll get an earful. Some are most frustrated by the dates of the transfer portal window. Others cannot stand how the early signing period is set up. Still others advocate for more drastic changes to the entire offseason structure, pushing to duplicate organized team activities (OTAs) modeled by the NFL.
The annual convention of the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) is underway in Charlotte, and these are all major topics of conversation. The FBS head coaches’ meeting takes place on Tuesday morning, and while AFCA executive director Craig Bohl told NBC Sports that the calendar issues are “not going to be vetted and solved in one short meeting,” he does believe there is real momentum from the sport’s stakeholders and the relevant NCAA administrative committees to address some of the biggest friction points as soon as this offseason.
In some ways, the biggest challenge decision-makers will have to overcome is inertia. It’s extremely hard to overhaul anything in college football, and it’s even more difficult to change things quickly (unless the courts are involved).
“It’s maddening that people can’t let go of the past to embrace the future,” said Illinois coach Bret Bielema, a vocal member of the AFCA board of trustees. “That’s probably the most disappointing part.
“They always keep trying to fit today’s world into last year’s calendar. It just doesn’t work. At some point, there’s got to be this total reset.”
Ultimately, complaints about the college football calendar fall into three buckets. Here’s an in-depth look at each issue — and suggestions for how to address them:
The transfer portal
This is the first offseason with a single transfer portal window. In the past, there were two — one opportunity for current college football players to change schools following the regular season (in December) and one toward the end of spring football (in April).
Now, it’s just one two-week window in January; it opened on Jan. 2 and will close on Jan. 16. All players who intend to transfer need to enter their name into the portal by its close, but they do not need to decide where they’re going (or enroll) by that deadline. The AFCA first pitched the January portal window, an idea that received overwhelming support (from all leagues except the Big Ten) before being officially approved through the NCAA legislative process.
Bohl said that he’s talked to a “small sample size” of coaches so far regarding moving the portal window from December to early January but that their feedback has so far seemed positive.
“I’ve not had guys pick up the phone and call me and say, ‘This was a train wreck. It’s the worst thing you’ve ever done,’” Bohl said. “I’ve had a couple say it’s been much better.”
The January portal window allowed coaches to focus more on postseason play, Bohl said. But, of course, there were plenty of players who announced their intention to enter the portal well before Jan. 2. And coaches who spoke to NBC Sports both on the record and on background all said that the later portal did not decrease the amount of tampering.
It’s also likely we’ll see more tampering come spring, with players who are unhappy with where they sit on the depth chart but no second portal window to use. (The NCAA might have to figure out what it’s going to do if players unenroll from one school and sign grant-in-aid documents to go elsewhere without using the portal process at all, as we saw last offseason with defensive back Xavier Lucas, who left Wisconsin and went to Miami.)
Most of the public complaints from coaches this month have been regarding the timing of the single portal window. Four CFP semifinalists had to work the January portal and host prospective players last week while preparing for the biggest game of their season. Portal decisions dominated the conversation in the sport, fully overshadowing two compelling games and even forcing reserve players on the rosters of participating teams to make transfer decisions while the season was still underway. Oregon running back Jay Harris, who was actively in the portal, had 16 carries in the Peach Bowl because the Ducks were dealing with injuries at the position.
Bielema said this is why the Big Ten supported spring for the single portal window. The league was overruled, but the reasoning was straightforward.
“It removed the portal from the playing calendar,” Bielema said. “It allowed players to get done in January, no matter if they’re on the national championship team or someone playing on January 1st. It would allow them to digest where they’re at and what they’re doing.
“It’s just that people of habit can’t let go of what their habits have been. I get it. I would rather have a player with me through the entire spring and summer, right? … But a (March or April) window is the least intrusive to the season that’s ending, and it’s the most acceptable to the season that’s beginning.”
Especially if you turn June and July practices into something like what the NFL does, Bielema added. OTAs and minicamps work well for professional players, even those who change teams in the offseason; they’re ready to go by the start of the season. They didn’t need to be practicing with their new team in February or March, which is almost a necessity in college. That’s why college coaches want both early-enrollee recruits and transfers on campus in January; development is more important in college football than it is with professionals in the NFL. But do college athletes really need to be on campus by January if the meat of the offseason workout program could take place later in the spring or summer?
“We’re the NFL in every other category,” Bielema said. “Why not make it their calendar?”
Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire has heard all the calls for a later spring portal, but he pushes back on them for two main reasons.
“One, I want as much time as possible to create the culture for the team that we’re going to have, so if you wait, you’re losing time,” McGuire said. “Two, if you have a spring portal, you’re actually going to have guys on your team in January, February and March that aren’t going to be on your team next year. So, what are you doing with those guys?”
It’s a fair question, and it could lead to some awkwardness. It might also lead to a player who was considering transferring after a coaching change to perhaps deciding to stay, with more time to get to know the new staff and system. Or they’ll be adamant they want out and maybe need to formulate a workout regimen on their own as they wait for the semester to wrap up.
The academic piece is what makes the portal timing so difficult. These athletes are still enrolled in school, which means they must abide by academic calendars. Some schools are on semesters, with others utilizing quarter systems or trimesters. Everybody has different drop/add deadlines and minimum requirements for incoming transfers. So, you can’t just plop a portal window in the day after the CFP ends — because late January is too late to switch schools if you’re a college student.
That college football players are still also students is something that matters to a lot of these coaches. It’s not just pollyannaish; it’s what they believe differentiates college football from a semipro league and it’s how they help develop these young men. Because they’re students who take classes, write papers and sit for exams.
“It’s the one thing that I do think is still extremely important,” McGuire said.
The coaching carousel and the early signing period
Both of Oregon’s coordinators who coached in last week’s Peach Bowl were pulling double duty; offensive coordinator Will Stein is the new head coach at Kentucky, and defensive coordinator Tosh Lupoi is taking over at Cal. Lane Kiffin infamously left Ole Miss for LSU ahead of the first round of the CFP, despite the Rebels making the 12-team field for the very first time. And both JMU head coach Bob Chesney (UCLA) and Tulane head coach Jon Sumrall (Florida) coached their old teams through the postseason after accepting new jobs.
It doesn’t work that way in the NFL. Coaches can’t leave their teams until after their season ends, and there are all sorts of rules around when and how coaches can interview with other organizations. It’s a very transparent process, too.
“And in the NFL, their contracts are honored by others. We don’t do that,” said Mid-American Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher, the vice-chair of the Division I Cabinet. “We build in these mechanisms to, in essence, breach the contract. You get to buy out this and that. We don’t honor contracts, and that’s a problem, but it’s part of the food chain we have. I don’t know that we can necessarily change that.”
Also in college, there’s a lot of pressure to make hires as quick as possible so the new coach can put together a recruiting class (made more difficult by an early-December early signing period) while retaining the program’s best players ahead of the transfer portal opening — and preparing to add transfers from the portal as well. It was one of the reasons so many athletic directors made early- and midseason coaching changes this past season, to get a perceived jump on the hiring process.
With just one portal window in January, it’s more important than ever to have the head coach in place ahead of its opening. If the portal didn’t open until March or April, athletic directors likely wouldn’t need to make as many midseason firings — because there’s no real advantage to be gained by starting your search early if the portal were to open months after the season ends for every team (and players don’t enroll and come to campus until the summer for all teams). That’s one of the strongest parts of the argument for a single spring window.
Another way to alleviate pressure on the carousel would be either removing the early signing period entirely or moving it back. Most recruits sign with schools during the early signing period so they can enroll ahead of the spring semester and participate in spring practices. The February signing period — which used to be the only time for recruits to sign with schools — has lost both its usefulness and its cultural cache.
Coaches are very split on their preferences here. Group of 5 coaches tend to support the early signing date so they can lock in good players they feel are overlooked by others. Some Power 4 coaches like the certainty of signing a class early so they know what they have before the portal opens. But coaches at blueblood programs tend to support the later date because they know the most talented players will sign with them (or flip to them) whenever they can.
And while the portal has become such an integral part of roster-building today, high-school recruiting remains critical. Most FBS openings were filled by the start of the early signing period this season in order to salvage their classes. If the signing period got pushed back or returned to its original place in February, schools could take their time hiring head coaches as well.
The College Football Playoff
Lanning has been one of the most vocal proponents of changing both the regular season and postseason schedules. He’s advocating to start games a week early — utilizing what is now referred to as Week 0 — and then playing each round of the CFP a week after its previous round.
He believes that fix alone would alleviate the pressure points around coaching changes and the transfer portal — without changes to either of those two. It would also allow college football to play more of its biggest games on Saturdays without NFL competition. The NFL can begin playing games on Saturdays on the third Saturday of December, which has overlapped with the CFP first round both this year and last season.
New Year’s Day is a holiday associated with college football, and it would be better if the sport either ended on that day or closer to it than it does now.
“Ideally the season ends January 1st,” Lanning said. “(That) should be the last game. (That) should be the championship game. Then the portal opens and then coaches that have to move on to their next opportunities get the opportunity to move to their next opportunities. …
“Our national championship game this year is January 19th, and that’s really hard to envision as a coach that’s going out and trying to join a new program and start a staff. It’s hard for players to understand what continuity looks like and where are they going to be at and to manage that with visits, the portal, everything else that exists.”
McGuire agreed, specifically with the sentiment that postseason games need to be played faster.
“They do it in high school,” McGuire said. “They do it in Division II, Division II, FCS, and the NFL. You play every seven days. It makes no sense to me. Why the two-week layoff? Or four? I had nearly a month layoff (this year before the CFP quarterfinals).
“Start after the conference championships, and you’re playing that first round. You literally could crown a national championship on January 1st if you did that. And you’d move football back into the first semester — which where it should be — and you’re opening up the portal on January 2nd.”
CFP executive director Rich Clark told NBC Sports last month that the commissioners and presidents who oversee the CFP prefer to keep the current two-week break between conference championship games and the first round for players’ health and safety reasons, but that leaders “will look at it and evaluate it as they do every year.”
“It’s a space that continually comes up in discussions,” Clark said.
It’s also a space (and timeline) that would be affected by expansion, were the CFP to expand to a 16-team bracket or beyond. So, this is a conversation that is happening in parallel to the one that the NCAA FBS Football Oversight Committee is having related to college football calendar issues. Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks and Buffalo athletic director Mark Alnutt, the FBS oversight committee chair, are leading that conversation. And that’s where any changes related to Week 0 competition or offseason workouts would need to originate. Same with portal windows, signing periods and the like.
“I’m pretty confident that you’re going to see some meaningful change that addresses where we’re at in our collegiate game,” said Bohl, the AFCA executive director and a nonvoting member of the FBS oversight committee. “We have to take a deep dive and look at it through a 360-degree viewpoint, so we don’t make a decision that has unintended consequences.
“Our world has changed, and we’ve put Band-Aids on the calendar around it. We need to take a holistic look … and if we need to make major changes, we’ve got to be open to that.”
There’s no magic wand to wave or fix that will appeal to 100 percent of the sport’s stakeholders. If there were an easy solution to the calendar problems, someone would have tried it by now.
“There’s not one golden answer that’s going to solve all these problems — if they even are problems,” said Mid-American Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher, the vice-chair of the Division I Cabinet that oversees all of D-I. “They’re conditions. They are conditions that you have to deal with. …
“An underlying problem is that we don’t control our eligibility rules very well. We don’t control transfer rules very well. We allow free movement of coaches. To a large extent, all of those things compound all of this.”
Over the years, it was the coaches who pushed for many changes and got them, from early enrollees to recruiting dead periods to early signing dates to a January portal. But as the Playoff and other outside aspects of the sport have changed, the calendar hasn’t caught up with the shift in priorities.
Now, there is too much angst in the sport right now to ignore all these pressure points. Someone will have to try to change something at some point, and coaches will need to remain open-minded to give it a real chance to succeed.
“The one guiding light that we have to use to stay on track is that the game of football is as popular as it’s ever been with parity at an unprecedented level,” Bielema said. “We’re obviously doing a lot of really good things, but we have to be able to sustain it.”
