Saturday’s semifinal games seemed like a reckoning of sorts for the College Football Playoff system. If the Powers That Be were determined to hold their second- and third-most important games of the season on a day other than New Year’s, on cable TV, well, these games needed to draw.
And they did.
ESPN revealed Sunday that Clemson’s thrilling comeback over Ohio State drew 21.151 million viewers, making it the most-watched semifinal, non-New Year’s Day division. (Which, of course, only begs the question why these games are played off of Jan. 1, but that’s a topic for another day.) The Peach Bowl, played in an earlier time slot and non-competitive by the second quarter, drew 17.2 million viewers, which represented an increase over Clemson’s 30-3 defeat of Notre Dame in the similarly-timed Cotton Bowl last season.
Overall, the semifinals averaged 19.3 million viewers, which represents the most successful non-New Year’s year in the CFP’s 6-year existence. The Peach and Fiesta bowls were up 13 percent over the last time those games hosted semis, on New Year’s Eve in 2013, and a 6 percent increase over last year’s Cotton and Orange semis.
Moving forward, 2020 will be the once-every-three-years time when the Playoff isn’t swimming upstream, with Rose and Sugar semifinals slated for Jan. 1, 2021. The Playoff will then swim upstream in a major way in 2021 and 2022, with New Year’s Eve semifinals in both years. With New Year’s Day falling on a Saturday in 2021, the Orange and Cotton bowls will host semifinals on Friday, Dec. 31, 2021, and the Peach and Fiesta will host again on Saturday, Dec. 31, 2022. So, the next time the Playoff will stage non-New Year’s Day/Eve semifinals -- as it did the past two years -- will be 2024.
