College Football Schedule Reform: Two Bye Weeks Gain Momentum

There's other conversations that are broader around the sport right now. One of them is about calendar itself. Now, this isn't about the playoff on the back end cuz we've talked about this about coaches want it to end closer to Jan 1. How do you avoid overlap with the NFL? That there's a lot of that we can talk about. But I want to talk just about the regular season because there has been a proposal from the Football Oversight Committee that recommends basically the elimination of week zero, but that the season would start then. So, that would become the new week one and you would have 14 weeks to play 12 games. So, again, it doesn't push up the end of the season, but it gives everyone

two byes over the course of that season. We've had it with the calendar falling a certain way sometimes, but this would, you know, be billed as health and safety reasons, nutrition, all of that, but basically just giving everyone more flexibility to get those 12 games in over 14 weeks and starting the season earlier. Where do you stand on this idea, which, by the way, has a lot of momentum behind it? Well, um I'd like to see the one that adjust the end of the season date. However, um I do think with an expanded playoff and some of the length of the season for some of these teams, I do think having two built-in open dates is really important. Um

I mean, you'll hear coaches talk about uh segmenting their season uh by where the bye week is for them. And it's basically like, "Okay, what is our plan to get guys healthy to the first bye week?" And then, "How are we going to recover our guys so they can be ready for the second spurt?" And then, "How do we get them to the next bye week?" I think all that really matters, especially um if you're expected to make a run deep into January if you're going to be playing around uh New Year's or a little bit later. So, um I'm here for it. I like the legs that it has. Week zero was always a little bit fun. I think you and I both enjoyed kind of just like the one-off games where, you

know, like it might be a couple of teams that you're not going to watch a ton throughout the year, but you get to be a real sicko for them that week. I would miss that aspect of it, but the idea structurally of having two bye weeks makes a ton of sense to me. Yeah, I again, I wish that it could move up the end of the season, but again, I think there's other ways to do it. Um one would be getting rid of conference championship games, um restructuring December a little bit. Um I think Ryan Day was the coach recently who was talking about how clunky it gets in the middle with like the longer layoff between rounds one and two. Mhm. Um so, I do think there's ways to adjust this, um but this is a regular season

adjustment. Starts it earlier and gives you a little bit more of a break, and I think that's totally right because we've had coaches who've had, you know, maybe 10 straight games before their bye. And all of these different weird, wacky scheduling quirks that I think two byes really addresses um and should help teams be healthier and ready to go for a postseason run, which now is longer with a larger bracket.