MIAMI GARDNES, Fla. – Joey McGuire was right all along. The college football calendar and the College Football Playoff require a complete overhaul. With Texas Tech’s loss to Oregon in the Orange Bowl on Thursday afternoon, teams that received a bye into the quarterfinals are 0-6. Indiana and Georgia hope to buck that trend later today, but the early data is hard to ignore. 

The good news is that there is a common-sense way to fix the issues. The bad news is that conflicting interests and the lack of centralized leadership means that common sense rarely wins the day. The Red Raiders claimed their first Big 12 championship and its first outright conference championship since the 1950s on Dec. 6 against BYU. They didn’t play for another 26 days. 

“The tough thing is that if we use the layoff, we’re going to use an excuse and we believe in this program, you don’t make excuses,” McGuire said after the game. “We’re in a world that makes sense, but that is where we’re at and we need to find a way to be better to win this game.”

Both McGuire and Oregon head coach Dan Lanning offered similar solutions to the growing issues within the CFP and the overall football calendar. College football is supposed to be a fall semester sport and the first change needs to be moving the season up to avoid playoff games happening well into January. 

They want Week 0 to be the start of the year with the CFP beginning the week after conference championship games. Instead of a long gap between games, they’d prefer to play every seven days and end the season with the championship on Jan. 1. That would mean that the transfer portal window, which starts on Jan. 2, could stay on the same day and not open until after the season. 

One of the major problems in the current landscape of college football is the movement – with players and coaches – before the season ends. There is no other sport that conducts its offseason in the middle of the season. Moving the season up to end on Jan. 1 helps alleviate some of those headaches. 

Ending the year on Jan. 1 would allow coaches to stay put until the end of the year and keep players from opting into the transfer portal until after the CFP ends. Does Lane Kiffin feel pressured to take the LSU job in December if Ole Miss could play in the championship before the portal opens? What about Jon Sumrall and Bob Chesney? 

Three of the 12 teams that reached the CFP in 2025 knew they’d have a new coach in 2026 before the first CFP game was played. That’s because universities and coaches feel pressure to get in the door early for recruiting purposes. Moving the calendar up doesn’t completely erase those needs, but it sure would help. 

The other issue facing the CFP was hiding in plain sight at the Orange Bowl. Crowd attendance was abysmal for a game of this magnitude. The upper deck of Hard Rock Stadium was sparsely decorated with Red Raider and Duck fans. The color easiest to see in those sections was the aqua of empty seats. The same was true at the Cotton Bowl the night before between Miami and Ohio State. 

“In my opinion, this game should be played at Texas Tech,” Lanning said back in December. “The higher-seeded team should have a home-field advantage.” 

The thing that makes college football great is the on-campus atmospheres, not neutral site games in soulless NFL stadiums. The higher seeds in the first round get to host a bye game and the scenes at Oregon, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, and Texas A&M back in December were live advertisements for what makes college football different than pro football. That is lost in the quarterfinals. 

Imagine if Ohio State hosted Miami or Tech hosted Oregon, and that it was on 14 days of rest instead of 26. How different would the results be? How great would the scenes be tonight if Indiana was hosting Alabama and Georgia was at home against Ole Miss? The bowl games could still rotate the semifinals and the national championship. Maybe one of the New Year’s Six bowls becomes home to a G5 championship game of sorts. 

The problem with college football is that we keep putting band-aids on wounds that require surgery. There is a better way, and everyone knows it. 

“It’s the craziest thing,” Lanning said prior to the game. “There’s a better way to do all of this. We’re not inventing the wheel here.” 

Unfortunately for everyone involved, if the leaders in college football were responsible for inventing the wheel, we’d still be dragging items on travois pulled by animals and riding horses everywhere.