Conference realignment, College Football Playoff expansion, name-image-likeness market freedoms and unlimited transfers have altered college football more in the last four years than at any time in its history. The introduction of direct payments from schools to athletes in 2025 will mark another revolutionary change, and collateral damage from the combined upheaval has the potential to affect every key stakeholder of the sport.

Coaches manage surging stress levels as their postseason preparation conflicts with traditional high school recruiting and navigating the transfer portal. Athletes weigh the benefits of staying with their team throughout the postseason against the risk of shrinking their future opportunities by not hitting the market sooner. Fans have taken on increased costs from supporting collectives to extra postseason travels.

It’s taxing to everyone involved.

“The unregulated nature of the transfer portal, the timing of the transfer portal, the unstructured NIL and payments to players are really having a detrimental impact on the entire sport,” said Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli. “We’re seeing players opt out of the regular season. We’re seeing players opt out of the Playoff, impact players. Something has to change.”

The answer is simple: College football needs a new calendar to make a great game better and save it from itself. But how does it get there?

Here is my proposal to normalize college football’s in-season and out-of-season schedule. The solutions below are not based chronologically but on how a person would rationalize each adjustment to the status quo.

The proposal

1. Move spring football to June: College football’s current transfer portal windows were installed to sync up with the academic calendar (which will not change) and spring football. Shifting spring football from March to the first Monday in June would alleviate pressure for athletes to enter the portal in December and find new homes before the spring semester begins in January. Each year, a dozen or so players from every team put off surgeries into January to address in-season injuries, and many miss traditional spring football. A June practice schedule would allow more of those players to return to full-team workouts healthy without missing valuable offseason practices.

2. Open the transfer portal in January: Once spring football is straightened out, the portal could move out of December. With an extra month to make decisions and less urgency to settle in with a new program for spring ball, athletes can remain focused on their current teams, the postseason opportunities they’ve worked to attain and, dare I say, school. The portal could open the Tuesday following Martin Luther King Jr. Day and remain open for 19 days. Then it would reopen the second and third weeks of April.

3. Mini-camps in March and April: Offseason conditioning and weight training programs are commonplace at most campuses, and that will continue from January through March. For players who have entered the portal, their former programs must provide access to workout facilities with designated time availability and staff supervision away from the current roster. Currently, players who are in the portal or are committed to other programs and attending second-semester classes at their previous universities work out separate from their former teams, often paying private coaches to help with their offseason training.

With spring football moving to June, players and coaches still deserve an opportunity to brush up on football as a team in March and April. To avoid a complete dropoff in skills and playbook retention, football programs could stage a pair of three-day mini-camps in helmets and shells, with all signed players, including transfers and incoming freshmen, allowed to participate. Schools could provide transportation and accommodations for participants not yet formally on campus to attend those two mini-camps.

4. Turn spring football into 12 June practices: A team workout period begins the first Monday in June and lasts four full weeks. Teams are allowed 12 on-field team practices, six of which can include full pads beginning the second week. Outside of a few high school athletes whose spring sports’ seasons spill into June, football players are on campus throughout June and July anyway.

5. Move up the early signing period: The December signing period moved this year to the Wednesday preceding conference championship games. In this system, the early signing period would open on Aug. 1 and last until the second Monday in October. Players could sign financial aid agreements throughout that time frame, which would allow them to enroll in time for the spring semester. The second signing period would take place on the first Wednesday in February, the traditional national signing day.

The recruiting calendar would consist of extended dead periods in December and February following signing day. January would remain a traditional contact period except for a four-day stretch surrounding the national championship.

6. June camps and visits: With 12 on-field workouts spread over four weeks, coaches still would have time to travel to satellite camps and stage their own on campus. Each coaching staff would decide the schedule. On official visit weekends, prospects can get a closer look at live coaching than many do during unofficial visits that currently take place during spring football in March or April.

7. Move the regular season schedule up one week: Instead of most teams opening their seasons on Labor Day weekend, the regular season would begin on the fourth weekend in August, on what’s currently known as Week 0. The regular season would conclude the Saturday before Thanksgiving, which would allow conference championship games to take place over the holiday weekend.

If a league decided not to have a title game to crown its champion, it could use Thanksgiving week as part of its regular-season schedule. Leagues also could incorporate a flexible matchup system for their final regular-season game, pairing off teams by their current place in the standings. The Big Ten attempted this approach in 2020 and called it “Champions Week.”

8. Add another round of home games to the College Football Playoff: CFP expansion feels inevitable, but whether the bracket grows to 14 or 16, the action can begin earlier in December as a result of the other tweaks to the fall calendar.

First-round matchups would take place on the first weekend of December on home campuses. National quarterfinals would take place on the third weekend of December, also on campus. Two bowls will stage the national semifinals on Jan. 1.

To avoid conflicts with the NFL playoffs, the CFP title game would take place either the second or third Friday in January at a neutral site, no earlier than Jan. 10 or later than Jan. 16. A Friday kickoff would allow for a week-long build-up without NFL playoff games and their ensuing conversation overshadowing the championship, which is a drawback of the current Monday date.

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9. Create a New Year’s Day Bowl Festival: The six bowls that make up the current quarterfinal and semifinal rounds would rotate so that two serve as semifinals every third season. While this carries the appearance of a demotion, it actually could protect the highest-level bowl games in similar fashion to the old New Year’s Six. The other four will become part of a New Year’s Day Bowl Festival from Dec 30 through Jan. 2 and include every team that lost its first-round matchup. Instead of a team ending its season as early as Dec. 1, this would allow programs to secure 15 extra practices and experience a positive postseason opportunity.

This year’s semifinals will be staged at the Orange and Cotton bowls. If a Bowl Festival this year consisted of eight teams, it would include South Carolina-Miami at the Peach Bowl, SMU-Alabama at the Sugar Bowl, Clemson-Ole Miss in the Fiesta Bowl and Indiana-Tennessee in the Rose Bowl.

10. Tier the other bowls: The bowl system can continue to operate as it wishes, although I’d recommend one or more pooling tiers to ensure quality teams and matchups. If six bowls participated in a draft process involving the top 12 teams outside the CFP with at least two guaranteed spots per power conference, the games might include Missouri-Iowa State in the Citrus Bowl, Army-Colorado in the Alamo Bowl, Illinois-BYU in the ReliaQuest Bowl, Syracuse-Memphis in the Music City Bowl, Texas A&M-Iowa in the Texas Bowl and Florida-Duke in the Gator Bowl.

A mini-tournament among the top four or eight Group of 5 teams that concludes in a bowl also could generate excitement.

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How this helps everyone

Coaches and their teams get to play out the season. Schools will fire coaches as usual, and coaches will agree to terms with different schools. But the reimagined calendar would allow those coaches to complete their seasons with their current teams without the immediate stress of signing day and the transfer portal. Meanwhile, the simplified December schedule would grant players considering finding a new team for next year a chance to finish their seasons with their teammates, apply themselves to their final exams and spend the second semester sorting through future options without losing valuable practice time at their next school.

The CFP gets more of a good thing. There is a public thirst for compelling on-campus football, which the attendance and interest for this year’s first round made abundantly clear. It wasn’t fair for top seeds Oregon, Georgia, Boise State and Arizona State to not receive that experience. Two rounds on campus (whether it’s 12, 14 or 16 teams) held earlier in December will add to the postseason’s drama and encourage more on-campus involvement.

Fans of contenders save money. For fans, the problem with an expanded CFP always begins with the price tag. Supporting your team to a championship meant traveling to at least three destination locations in a three-week span plus previous trips. Take Penn State for instance. To compete for the Big Ten championship, the Nittany Lions had to fly to Indianapolis (or drive 500 miles). After a first-round home game against SMU, Penn State faces Boise State in Phoenix for a quarterfinal. A win there sets up a semifinal in Miami, then a flight to Atlanta for the national championship.

The average fan cannot make all those trips; it’s too costly. But if Penn State opens with two home CFP games, then the final two rounds become more affordable. 

College football has a good thing going. The College Football Playoff has brought extra attention to the sport at a time when interest tends to wane. Realignment has added several more compelling regular-season matchups. The transfer portal helps teams reload quickly and immediately compete for championships (see Indiana this year). With schools expecting to share revenue with athletes beginning July 1, 2025, collectives will see their role change in a way that may help curb fan paranoia about uncontrollable markets.

But the sport could burn out good people involved in it if college football’s hierarchy doesn’t alter its calendar. Perhaps this proposal would mark a first step toward regaining some sanity and make a great game even better. Even if it adds to the conversation, it has done its job.

(Photo: Jack Gorman / Getty Images)