Texas Tech football coach Joey McGuire on college football calendar
Texas Tech football coach Joey McGuire says the season should start earlier and finish on New Year’s Day.
When I was a kid, New Year’s Day stood out as one of the best sports days of the year.
The schedule featured the Southwest Conference champion playing in the Cotton Bowl around noon, the Big Ten and (dating myself here) the Pac-8 champion locking horns in the Rose Bowl from mid-afternoon to early evening and the Big Eight champion playing in the Orange Bowl starting around, oh, 7 p.m. The Sugar Bowl with the SEC champion could be an early afternoon game or a night game.
It was a glorious football-palooza until halftime at the Orange Bowl. Then dread: After two weeks away, it was back to school tomorrow.
Still, there was something good and proper about the college football season being neatly wrapped up after a slate of games on New Year’s Day.
Good on Texas Tech football coach Joey McGuire and his Orange Bowl counterpart, Oregon coach Dan Lanning, for calling over recent weeks for fixing the sport’s calendar. McGuire correctly points out that college football players are attached to their programs year-round now. After spring practice comes summer conditioning — with a limited hours of coaches’ supervision — that starts in early June.
No reason the season can’t start at least a week earlier.
Not like a generation ago when players went home in the summer with a workout plan from the strength and conditioning coach, and it was honor system how closely they adhered.
“We’ve got these kids all summer long,” McGuire said. “(August preseason) camp doesn’t need to be a month long. We can play zero week.”
Instead, the college football calendar 2025 still operates with vestiges of 1985.
The NCAA transfer portal is open from Jan. 2-16, and the last two rounds of the College Football Playoff are the semifinals on Jan. 8-9 and the championship game on Jan. 19. At Texas Tech, residence halls for the spring semester open on Jan. 11 with classes starting on Jan. 14.
Set aside for a moment what cynicism you might harbor about major-college athletes as students. Texas Tech has potential transfers visiting this weekend and ones who pick the Red Raiders immediately will have a little over a week to ship their belongings, move in, enroll and start classes.
Not that that’s likely to change. Most coaches prefer to start building next year’s team as soon as this season ends, so if there’s one thing unlikely to change, it’s the winter transfer portal window.
Still, there’s a lot of December weekends that could be put to use playing football games.
Lanning and McGuire, in the leadup to the Orange Bowl, both advocated for the CFP starting the week after conference championship games.
“Every playoff game should be played every single weekend until you finish the season,” Lanning said. “Even it means we start week zero, you eliminate byes (and) the season ends January 1. Then the portal opens. …
“Most of us now try to get (transfers) in as mid-year players, and you want them to be able to join your program at semester, which is a challenge. But I think the first really clear indicator, a place that we can make this better, is to back the season up [start earlier].”
McGuire points out that Texas high-school state champions play 16 games and raise their trophies before Christmas.
“We should have a national champion on Jan. 1,” he said, “and it would be really easy to do with 12 teams. It’d be easy to do with 16 teams, and then the portal would open on the second (of January). … It just takes common sense, man.”
McGuire thinks conversation around the subject will pick up this off-season and maybe gain some traction.
That’s a discussion long overdue.