Kickoff Dates and Times

Why Scheduling Matters

Scheduling 31 playoff games across five rounds while avoiding NFL conflicts and ensuring fair rest periods for all teams requires careful planning. Unlike the current 12-team playoff, a 32-team format must coordinate games across multiple days and weeks while maintaining competitive balance. Teams that play on Thursday need adequate rest before their next game, and no team should gain an unfair advantage simply because of when their game was scheduled.

Overview

We are going to breakdown the proposed kickoff dates and times for each playoff round. The distribution of TV Networks/streaming networks through the five playoff rounds can be found here.

First Two Rounds

For the second round, the later pairings are only possible if the following happens:

• At least one team seeded 1-8 from the Pacific and/or Mountain Time Zone advance to the second round
• At least one team seeded 9-16 from the Pacific and/or Mountain Time Zone advance and is paired with an unseeded team in the second round
• A pair of unseeded teams, where one of them is from Pacific and/or Mountain Time Zone; if the unseeded team from Pacific and/or Mountain Time is higher ranked, they would be the designated host

Otherwise, if there are no teams from Pacific and/or Mountain Time advancing to the second round, then for the Wednesday and Friday kickoffs, either Pair 1 or 2 would apply. For Saturday, the first pairing would apply.

For both the first and second round games, we’re going to need to do them to a point where at least one team does not have a rest advantage/disadvantage. In addition, each first round game would need to be in pairs of the adjacent seeds.

In this way, there would be no less than seven days between games.

The reason no playoff game would air on Thursday Night is because the NFL has Thursday Night games every year from the Thursday after Labor Day up until the penultimate week of the regular season (there is no Thursday Night game during the NFL regular season finale). The Thursday Night games on Amazon Prime would begin during Week 2 of the NFL season (with the exception of Thanksgiving Week as Thanksgiving Day is an NFL Triple Header on linear television, and the NFL also recently started streaming Black Friday NFL games). In addition, the Amazon Prime Thursday Night games are simulcasted to the corresponding local channels of the teams' respective media markets. You can learn about this in the Recent NFL Changes page.

Final Three Rounds

The kickoff times for the quarterfinal, semifinal and national championship games would depend on the NFL.

Because the Rose Bowl would be an annual semifinal game, the semifinals would kick off on Jan. 1 every year (Jan. 2 if New Year’s falls on a Sunday). The National Championship game would kick off on a Friday Night (or Saturday Night if schedule allows).

Consolation Bowl Games

Since the consolation bowl games would be implemented for second round playoff participants, the kickoff dates and times would look like the following:

Conclusion

The biggest advantage to this schedule is that we don’t really have to worry about the NFL. However, you’ll notice that there is more flexibility to have a Friday Night National Championship Game kickoff than doing a Monday Night kickoff. This is because with the current NFL season, in certain years, the NFL would have a wildcard game on a Monday Night game when Jan. 12-18 falls on a Monday. In addition, the FCS Championship game has used Monday Night kickoffs since the 2024 season. When New Year’s Day falls on Sunday or Monday, the FCS Championship game would utilize the second Monday of January. Because of this, only the Friday Night kickoffs would have been good enough. Overall, this schedule is much better than having to potentially start on the second weekend of December and concluding well into January.