Would You Believe Me If I Told You The Ratings For The College Football Playoff Were Absolute Dogshit?

USA – The powers behind the College Football Playoff remain committed to playing on New Year’s Eve — and to the belief that it will eventually be a TV ratings success.

Combined overnight ratings for the New Year’s Six bowls, which included the Orange and Cotton bowls which served as Playoff semifinals, were down 13% from a year ago, from an average 8.2 rating to 7.1. But Bill Hancock, the CFP’s executive director, called the decline “modest,” adding: “It’s not that much of a surprise.”

The decline for the two Playoff semifinals was more dramatic. A year ago, the first Playoff semifinals set cable TV ratings records on New Year’s Day in the Rose (15.5 rating) and Sugar (15.3) bowls. By contrast, Thursday’s New Year’s Eve semifinals in the Orange and Cotton bowls drew 9.7 and 9.9 ratings, respectively.

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What a shocker! Who knew that putting the two biggest games of the season thus far on freaking New Years Eve would be bad for business? And not just bad – even worse than everyone predicted.

Gotta love the CFP’s executive director Bill Hancock spouting that optimism though –

“We had some bum luck with the lack of competitive games,” Hancock said. “Things would have been different with competitive games. How much different, nobody knows.

“We’re very confident that every year will be different and over time these games will be ingrained into a part of the New Year’s Eve tradition.”

If you close your eyes and think really hard you can actually picture him reciting these lines to himself in his bathroom mirror using different voice tones trying to sound convincing. Yeah man, there was a FORTY PERCENT decline in viewership because the games ended up being kind of blowouts. Never mind that the Clemson game which came first was really, really good and competitive for like 70% of it, and the next game up between Bama and Sparty was 0-0 for a while at the start. Lopsided final scores kept almost half of last year’s viewers away, had to be it, definitely wasn’t the timing of the games.

Maybe tell the Rose Bowl executives demanding that Saturday window to go fuck themselves? Maybe instead of trying to force a “New Year’s Eve tradition” on everyone when it clearly will never happen, focus on a night that your demographic can actually watch TV? It really, really can’t be that hard to NOT ruin an awesome Playoff to cap off an awesome regular season by airing games that any guy with a wife, girlfriend, or any sort of social life whatsoever can barely actually see.