How the College Football Schedule Works

Every autumn, millions of young adults journey back to college campuses all around the country. Whether you are a sports fan or not, it is pretty difficult to escape the dynamo that is college football. College football is one of the country’s most beloved spectator sports, and has been for several decades. With over 100 teams competing at the top level (Division 1-A), the college football schedule plays a crucial role in the sport.

One of the more exciting aspects of the sport, for good or bad, is the debate that arises out of the championship question. Unlike many other sports, both collegiate and professional, college football does not have a playoff system. Instead, college football teams are ranked, mostly by order of their overall record and the relative strength of opponents beaten. You can probably see already how important, then, the college football schedule is to many teams competing for the title.

Any major team’s college football schedule has to strike a proper competitive balance. Many teams bring in weak opponents in the non-conference portion of the season, ultimately treating this game like a scrimmage. This has back-fired, as top-rated teams are upset and their chances of winning a title are over before the season had barely begun. Non-conference games this early in the college football schedule is also a good time for non-conference rivalries. Some good examples of this is Michigan and Notre Dame and Iowa and Iowa State. A small handful of competitive teams will schedule games against other top 25 teams, in the hopes of boosting their strength of schedule. This can have obvious risks of course, but high rewards.

After a handful of non-conference games, the teams enter into the conference portion of the college football schedule. These games are usually highly competitive, as several of the conference of anywhere between three to seven teams ranked nationally. Teams play most, if not all, opposing teams in the conference each year. This familiarity has bred the most intense and passionate rivalries in college football, if not all of sports.

Many conference champions advance on to high yield bowl games, the final portion of the college football schedule. Here, the best teams in each conference play against each other in front of large, neutral-site crowds and nationally televised audiences. The top ranked two teams play each other for the national championship.

Overall the college football schedule stretches across for weeks and months; teams play their first game in late August, and the national championship is not decided until the second week of January the following year. Along the way, many twist and turns, routs and upsets make college football one of the most exciting and beloved sports in the whole country.

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