The College Football National Championship Game is When? How the Wait Widened

After the playoff schedule was reset, Hancock said organizers considered moving this season’s title game to Jan. 6, but found that some venues associated with the game, which leaves a vast footprint on its host city, were unavailable because of a conflicting event.

According to New Orleans Company, the city’s convention and tourism organization, approximately 25,000 people were in town this past weekend for Wizard World, which bills itself as “a traveling pop culture expo for fans of comics, sci-fi, movies, gaming, and more.” No bigger non-sports event will come to New Orleans in the first few months this year.

And changing the day of the week for the championship game — away from its usual Monday night — would have been out of step with the playoff’s tradition, partly forged to not contend with the N.F.L. schedule.

Hancock said he did not fear that the 16-day waiting period would hurt the playoff’s popularity or attention. “There will be plenty of football, there will be plenty of talk about college football,” he said. “We’re not worried about a decline in interest.”

Nick Dawson, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions, was optimistic that the long gap between games would help the network market the championship game. “We have two full weeks to really design, implement and run a promotional campaign for the championship game,” he said, compared with most years in which ESPN spends months building toward the playoffs only to have “a very short window to promote the crown jewel game.”

ESPN has put together a four-part series — on its streaming platform ESPN+ — on the championship, and the network’s N.F.L. shows will shoot from New Orleans next weekend. “The N.F.L. piece is the biggest challenge,” said Dawson. “The N.F.L. is going to take over that conversation to some extent.”

The long layoff also presented an opportunity for some lesser-known college bowl games, like the LendingTree Bowl, to draw attention. Historically, the college football season ended with games like the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl, played on New Year’s Day. But in the mid-2000s, after the establishment of the Bowl Championship Series and a national championship game, games like the GMAC Bowl and the International Bowl began scheduling their games to be held after Jan. 1 in hopes of keeping college football fans engaged as they awaited the championship game.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/sports/ncaafootball/when-is-the-national-championship-game.html?emc=rss&partner=rss