The College Football Playoff announced the dates and bowl sites for its upcoming quarterfinal and semifinal games for the 2026 and 2027 Playoffs in a release Tuesday afternoon.
The 2026 national quarterfinals will kick off on Wednesday, Dec. 30 with the Fiesta Bowl, while the Cotton Bowl, Peach Bowl and Rose Bowl will be held two days later on Friday, Jan. 1, 2027. The national semifinals will then follow two weeks after that, beginning with the Orange Bowl set for Thursday, Jan. 14 and the Sugar Bowl set for Friday, Jan. 15. The 2027 CFP National Championship Game will follow 10 days later on Monday, Jan. 25 at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Newly hired Florida head coach Jon Sumrall reacted to this news during a press conference on Wednesday, calling the calendar ‘asinine’ and ‘absurd’. Sumrall suggested that the NCAA move the season and College Football Playoff up in order to end the season closer to the beginning of January, instead of the end.
“I would love for us to move the season up a week or two,” Sumrall said. “I think it’s asinine. I get it that it’s for TV and money, but the college football championship game next year is on the (January) 24th (actually the 25th). That’s absurd to me. That means the mid-point of the football season is like mid-late November. We could take for an hour on this, but there’s some other parts to this too.
“We moved up the high school signing date to early Dec., and we did that to protect the high school kids from losing their spots to transfers. But then, right after we did that, we moved the Transfer Portal window back. So it’s like ‘why did we move high school signing day from the middle of Dec. to the beginning?’ So we fix a problem, but then we change the other part of it. It just seems a bit scattered. There’s still this thing called school. These guys still have to go to school… allegedly.
“The academic calendar and the football season really doesn’t match like it used to, which I think for us archaic football coaches and how we think is a bit messy. It’s a little unclean. But, move the season up. Start the Playoffs earlier and end the Playoffs earlier. Make it match a little bit more to the old Jan. 1 National Championship Game. Maybe not the first and maybe it’s the fourth, but that would be awesome.”
This past cycle, the Transfer Portal opened on Jan. 2 and closed on Jan. 16. The College Football Playoff National Championship Game between No. 1 Indiana and No. 10 Miami did not even take place until Jan. 19, and that date will be moved back six more days next season.
Sumrall may have a plethora of good ideas, but those ideas would not come to fruition until 2028 at the earliest. Dates were already announced for both next season’s CFP and the 2027 CFP.
On3’s Alex Byington contributed to this article.