AP Column: Moving semifinals to New Year's Eve a total flop

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BleedGopher

BleedGopher

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per the AP:

Bill Hancock, executive director of the College Football Playoff, said he would await the ratings for the New Year's Day games before making any declarations on whether this worked.

"It's just not appropriate to talk until all the results are in," he said Friday. "I guess it's like asking a coach to talk about a whole game at halftime."

Well, let's throw out the talking points we know so far.

Start with ESPN's performance on New Year's Eve.

It was downright abysmal.

The Orange Bowl got a 9.1 rating, a plunge of 38.5 percent from last year's Rose Bowl (14.8) held in the same afternoon time slot but on Jan. 1. The number of viewers fell even more — dropping 44.5 percent from 28,164,000 for the Rose to just 15,640,000 for the Orange, a staggering decline for such a high-profile event.

The Cotton Bowl endured a similar nosedive. The 9.6 rating was down a whopping 36.8 percent from last year's 15.2 for the Sugar Bowl in the same time slot, while the total viewership crashed 34.4 percent, going from 28,271,000 to 18,552,000.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/a257...mn-moving-semifinals-new-years-eve-total-flop

Go Gophers!!
 

Well game 2 was not watched because most people have lives and were doing something fun and it was a freaking blowout. So no biggie there. Jan 1 is a better idea for the two games.
 

The move to NYE was a major mistake. I know many people who watched last year who did not watch this year due to other commitments. Myself included.
 

More of the same next year. They won't go up against the NFL on Sunday, Jan 1.

A real shame too. I would love to watch these closely, but I'm not a hermit so I usually just end up seeing a play here or there. Luckily this year it didn't matter. College Football still has work to do.
 

mnsportsgeek said:
More of the same next year. They won't go up against the NFL on Sunday, Jan 1.

A real shame too. I would love to watch these closely, but I'm not a hermit so I usually just end up seeing a play here or there. Luckily this year it didn't matter. College Football still has work to do.
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Then play them on the 2nd. Or two consecutive night's. New Years eve is a terrible idea.
 


Yahoo: Awful CFP semifinal ratings show sport still lacks common sense

The New Year's Eve experience was a two-fold disaster. Not only did millions fewer people watch the playoff games, but it sucked all the life out of New Year's Day. Normally the Jan. 1 games serve as a lead-in to the big game (like they did even during the BCS and last year); now they just feel like exhibitions.

Sure, some of the bowl games turned into complete duds – Stanford jumped Iowa so viciously that when the Cardinal Band mockingly played a halftime tribute to FarmersOnly.com, it felt mean. (Not really, it was still funny.)

That doesn't fully explain the 7.9 rating – the lowest on record (dating back to 1983). Blowouts don't normally cause such terrible disinterest. There's been a million of them. Consider the 2009 Rose Bowl: it was a game with no national title implications, USC led Penn State 31-7 in the first half in a game that, like this year, and it was never competitive (a couple late, meaningless scores caused the final to be USC 38-24). People still watched – 20.6 million of them, or 10 percent more than either of this year's semifinals.

The playoff is still controlled by the bowls, or commissioners who are beholden to the bowls. They gave those sites essentially no bid contracts to stage massively profitable games that the sport pointlessly outsources to them.

You can never prevent lopsided games. They happen. You can schedule to limit their impact. The whole sport seemed to stop dead in its tracks a little after halftime of Alabama-Michigan State. New Year's Day was an afterthought.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/awful-...here-is-a-limit-to-greed-001910612-ncaaf.html

Go Gophers!!
 

BleedGopher said:
Yahoo: Awful CFP semifinal ratings show sport still lacks common sense

The New Year's Eve experience was a two-fold disaster. Not only did millions fewer people watch the playoff games, but it sucked all the life out of New Year's Day. Normally the Jan. 1 games serve as a lead-in to the big game (like they did even during the BCS and last year); now they just feel like exhibitions.

Sure, some of the bowl games turned into complete duds – Stanford jumped Iowa so viciously that when the Cardinal Band mockingly played a halftime tribute to FarmersOnly.com, it felt mean. (Not really, it was still funny.)

That doesn't fully explain the 7.9 rating – the lowest on record (dating back to 1983). Blowouts don't normally cause such terrible disinterest. There's been a million of them. Consider the 2009 Rose Bowl: it was a game with no national title implications, USC led Penn State 31-7 in the first half in a game that, like this year, and it was never competitive (a couple late, meaningless scores caused the final to be USC 38-24). People still watched – 20.6 million of them, or 10 percent more than either of this year's semifinals.

The playoff is still controlled by the bowls, or commissioners who are beholden to the bowls. They gave those sites essentially no bid contracts to stage massively profitable games that the sport pointlessly outsources to them.

You can never prevent lopsided games. They happen. You can schedule to limit their impact. The whole sport seemed to stop dead in its tracks a little after halftime of Alabama-Michigan State. New Year's Day was an afterthought.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/awful-...here-is-a-limit-to-greed-001910612-ncaaf.html

Go Gophers!!
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At least nobody can claim the need for more than 4 teams in the playoff after this year's disaster
 

Sparlimb said:
Then play them on the 2nd. Or two consecutive night's. New Years eve is a terrible idea.
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I'd be more than okay with doing one game on the 30th and one on the 2nd (or 29th & 30th) if it means avoiding NYE and the NFL. No reason to play them on the same night. The NFL wouldn't do something so stupid. Give the 1 seed a couple more days off or push the championship game out another week to avoid the rest argument altogether. Their conference championships are almost always a Saturday-Sunday event. When you have an opportunity to control the living room for 2 nights, you take it.
 

mnsportsgeek said:
I'd be more than okay with doing one game on the 30th and one on the 2nd (or 29th & 30th) if it means avoiding NYE and the NFL. No reason to play them on the same night. The NFL wouldn't do something so stupid. Give the 1 seed a couple more days off or push the championship game out another week to avoid the rest argument altogether. Their conference championships are almost always a Saturday-Sunday event. When you have an opportunity to control the living room for 2 nights, you take it.
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That's not how the NFL does things. AFC and NFC Championship games are always on the same day.
 




When Jan. 1 falls on a Sunday, the big bowls tend to be on Jan. 2. New Year's Eve is fine for the semis next year ... it's a Saturday. Play them in the afternoon/early evening on what is a "regular" college football day.

Long term, however, playing those games at night on NYE on a weekday won't work well.

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk
 

Here's what I would do:

- In years where the Rose Bowl is part of the semi-finals, play them both on New Year's Day.
- In years where the Rose Bowl is not part of the semis, play one game on New Year's Day night and the other the following night.
- In years where New Year's Day falls on a Sunday (like next year), play one on the 2nd and the other on the 3rd.

There is a reason they play the championship game for football and basketball during the week. Everyone is home so the ratings are great.
 

Everyone could see the New Years Eve plan was going to fail, and fail mightily. I think I started seeing people call this out, even nationally, starting in the middle of last year's playoff. Everyone but the NCAA saw it coming.

Not only was this a predictable ratings failure with the two playoff games, but it also served to muddle the separation for the "New Years six" games. The damage from the same bad decisions went farther than the playoff.

Of course the best way to do it would see the bowl games build throughout the week to Jan 1, which would be reserved for New Years six bowls, with the last two of the day being the playoff. But, the same bowl system palm greasing mentality that stunted the opportunity to have a playoff all these years will continue to F with common sense.
 



The NCAA knew this would happen. They just don't care. The check from ESPN is still good.

I hope the NCAA doesn't bow down to ESPN and that they keep the contract as signed.


Plus, part of the rating flop was that it was two terrible games.
The second most popular team in Michigan and South Carolina
An Oklahoma team that lost to 5-7 Texas.
And Alabama again.
 

Zulgad said on the radio show yesterday that ESPN requested that the semifinals be played on Saturday this year since there were no NFL games, but were turned down by the bowl committee.
 

bigticket1 said:
Zulgad said on the radio show yesterday that ESPN requested that the semifinals be played on Saturday this year since there were no NFL games, but were turned down by the bowl committee.
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That would have made way too much sense.
 


So what? Everyone still gets paid. Next year, it will be on Friday December 30. Everyone will get paid. Even more than this year. Non-issue.
 

It just felt really weird having these games take place on New Years Eve. It made them seem almost anticlimactic rather than the peak events they should be, and for me at least it kind of sucked the life right out of them before the games even started.
 

highwayman said:
So what? Everyone still gets paid. Next year, it will be on Friday December 30. Everyone will get paid. Even more than this year. Non-issue.
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Which is still a work day for most people.
 

highwayman said:
So what? Everyone still gets paid. Next year, it will be on Friday December 30. Everyone will get paid. Even more than this year. Non-issue.
Click to expand...
Next year New Years Eve is on a Saturday, which should help get the ratings back in line if they start the games at noon and 4 Central. The year after that the semis are back in the Rose and Sugar. It's the 2018-19 cycle that ESPN has to aim at to get fixed. NYE is a Monday.
 

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