No bowl games on New Year's Eve? Whatever, we get the College Football Playoff on New Year's Day!

College football’s traditional New Year’s Day bowls are, for the most part, not on New Year’s Day in 2018. But the Playoff semifinals are, after two years of not being then.

That’s all because of the calendar, the NFL, and TV ratings.

The last two years, the Playoff’s been on New Year’s Eve. But that didn’t work this year, because New Year’s Eve is a Sunday.

Sunday is the last day of the NFL season, and it would be dumb to put college football’s marquee event directly up against a full slate of NFL games.

The other New Year’s Six bowls still have to go before the Playoff.

Well, they don’t have to, but it seems silly to hold less big-but-still-prestigious games after you’ve held the two Playoff semifinals.

And the Playoff isn’t going to start any time after New Year’s Day.

Especially not this year, when Jan. 2 is a Tuesday, a.k.a. the day most of the American workforce goes back to work and many of its students go back to school.

That leaves Dec. 30 as the last best option for New Year’s Six games.

The Fiesta (4 p.m.) and Orange (8 p.m.) Bowls will get the national scene to themselves on Saturday, Dec. 30. The Cotton already happened on Friday night.

That only leaves the Peach to fit in around lunchtime on New Year’s Day, before the Playoff games.

In recent years, the Playoff thought it’d be slick by having New Year’s Eve semis.

The Playoff’s organizers decided at the outset of the event that the semifinals would happen on New Year’s Eve two out of every three years. The idea was that college football could own that night, just as it already owned New Year’s Day (and like how the NBA owns Christmas Day and MLB owns the Fourth of July).

"We really do think we're going to change the paradigm of New Year's Eve," Playoff executive director Bill Hancock said in July 2015, before the first try.

The ratings demonstrated that this wasn’t a good idea.

The immediate returns were terrible:

Overnights: 9.9 for Cotton and 9.7 for Orange. Last year's semis were 15.5 for the early game and 15.3 for the late one.
— John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) January 1, 2016

Things got a little better last year, but the semis still did far worse ratings on New Year’s Eve than they did on New Year’s Day 2015, for the 2014 season’s Playoff.

And of course this wasn’t a good idea.

New Year’s Eve is the preeminent going-out night in American culture. People like to go to parties on that night. In the 2015 season’s Playoff, the semis kicked at 4 p.m. ET and 8 p.m. ET. That put the latter game, the Alabama-Michigan State Cotton Bowl blowout, smack dab in the middle of East Coasters’ NYE parties. Plenty of people put the game on in bars or house parties, but:

Putting a bunch of people in front of one screen doesn’t help ratings, and
Viewership was still definitely down from the New Year’s Day games a year earlier.

Playoff organizers moved the 2016 season’s semis up an hour, to 3 and 7 p.m. ET. That amounted to keeping the games on Pretty Dumb Day, but at least they were on at Somewhat More Palatable to Most People O’Clock.

This year’s games were always set for New Year’s Day anyway.

The plan has always been that in years when the Rose and Sugar Bowls were the semifinals, the games would be on New Year’s Day. That kept with both games’ traditions. Three of the other four New Year’s Six bowl games were to happen on Dec. 31, giving college football some market penetration that night anyway. Those dates are already locked in for the 2020 and 2022 seasons’ Playoff semis at the Rose and Sugar Bowls, too.

But the Playoff decided to cut back on New Year’s Eve going forward.

Initially, there were supposed to be NYE playoff semis in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. Those game dates have since changed, although the games will be on New Year’s Eve 2022 and 2023. The 2022 semis will be on a Saturday, as were the 2016 season’s. When that happens, the Rose Bowl is on Jan. 2, because the Rose Bowl doesn’t happen on Sundays due to some history having to do with 19th-century horses:

The Tournament wanted to avoid frightening horses that would be hitched outside churches and thus interfering with worship services so the events were moved to the next day, January 2. Though horses are no longer outside local churches, the tradition remains to this day.

Hancock said limiting NYE semifinals was “the right thing to do for our fans.” He’d previously defended the schedule and suggested it wouldn’t change, but relented, which is totally unlike him.

“We tried to do something special with New Year’s Eve, even when it fell on a weekday,” he said in announcing the change in the summer of 2016. “But after studying this to see if it worked, we think we can do better. These adjustments will allow more people to experience the games they enjoy so much. For these four years, our previous call is reversed.”