Saturdays are for the (big) boys
College football owns Saturdays in the fall. So why are the sport’s biggest games played on a Thursday, Friday and Monday?
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we’re talking about George Washington and the $25 billion elephant in the room.
Over the past week, college football fans have found a new favorite meme—using a recent SNL appearance from comedian Nate Bargatze to poke fun at the illogical nature of the sport’s current structure.
If you haven’t seen the original sketches, they’re great. Bargatze plays a stoic George Washington who inspires his troops by extoling the virtues of their new nation. Each example, however, only highlights an absurdity of American culture. There shall be two different scales of temperature—one will make sense to the entire world and the other will be random, he says to his increasingly confused men. And our great nation will use the random one.
The joke layers perfectly onto the current madness of college sports, which has grown increasingly hard to explain to any rational individual. The courts said schools were illegally capping athlete compensation, so they responded with a new cap. It’s okay though, because no one abides by the cap. Athletes have four years of eligibility, but maybe also seven.
One of the most popular versions of this meme asks a simple question about the timing of the College Football Playoff’s biggest games. If the regular season is defined by Saturdays, why are the semifinals played on a Thursday and Friday, with the championship game on a Monday?
Unlike much of what ails college sports in 2026, this one actually has a simple answer. The College Football Playoff doesn’t play on Saturdays in January because the NFL does, and no one—the CFP or its media partners—want to schedule its most important games against the NFL playoffs.
That’s of course different from the college regular season, which is protected from the NFL by a regulation signed into law by President Kennedy. The 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act (SBA) allowed the NFL to sell every team’s broadcasting rights as a single entity1, but in doing so, took into account how this new reality could impact the lower levels of the sport. As a concession, the U.S. government said the pro league could not televise games after 6PM on Fridays to protect high school games, and could not broadcast games on Saturdays to protect college. This is why the NFL’s new Black Friday games start at the weird time of 3PM ET, so as not to run afoul of the SBA.
But here’s the catch: football seasons were much shorter sixty years ago. The 1961 NFL championship game, for example, was played in December. So the SBA only covers the three months from early September to the middle of December. After that, the NFL is free to telecast games on those other days, and it does so immediately.
This year the NFL played multiple Saturday games on Dec. 20 (Week 16), Dec. 27 (Week 17) and Jan. 3 (Week 18). The playoffs, which start this weekend, have two playoff games this Saturday, and then games next Saturday as well.
That puts college football in a tough spot. Instead of scheduling its semis up against the NFL’s divisional round, it chooses instead to play on nights where it can be the unquestioned biggest game in town. The two CFP semifinals this week are on Thursday and Friday, up against regular season slates of NHL and NBA games. Next Monday’s national title game is the same.
That Monday is available only because of the NFL’s late-season constraints and the overlap of media partners. There is no Monday Night Football in Week 18, which is when the FCS plays its national championship game on ESPN. There is one Monday night NFL game this weekend (no college game), but the NFL stops playing those as the playoffs go on, so as to prevent any team from having to play on shorter rest than its opponent. That opens the door for Miami and either Indiana or Oregon to face off on the third Monday of January.
At least for now. We’ve written a lot about the NFL’s current Expansion Era™️. Roger Goodell wants to own more timeslots, and more days of the year. And as that happens, college football will likely keep chasing its own spotlight.
Jacob’s ⚡Take: What makes college football special is its unique atmospheres, fans returning to campus for daylong tailgates built around iconic venues. But what makes college football valuable is TV. Hence a matchup of Ole Miss and Miami at 5:30 p.m. local time in Glendale, Arizona last night.
On the most recent Sporticast episode, Eben and Scott discussed upcoming changes in sports ticketing. It opened with a classic Soshnick rant 👇
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
We wrote about the SBA earlier this month for a different reason, in a post titled, “The only person that ever made the NFL quiver”
The SBA provision protecting college Saturdays is fascinating regulatory history. What really jumps out is how the CFP essentially reverse-engineered a schedule around NFL blackout dates rather than building around its own identity. I remember when BCS championship games bounced around different weeknights and it always felt werid, like the sport was borrowing timeslots instead of owning them. The irony is college football spent decades building Saturday as sacred ground, then voluntarily gave it up for the postseason becuase NFL ratings pressure was too strong.