At the College Football Playoffs (CFP) spring meeting earlier this week, Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork was prepared with bold new suggestions for the future of the CFP. He, along with athletic directors from Texas, Penn State and Notre Dame, met with the 10 FBS commissioners to represent schools that hosted first-round games and participated in the semi-finals or championship game.
While the goal of this meeting was for the CFP commissioners to hear feedback on the 12-team structure, according to ESPN, Bjork took this opportunity to suggest schedule changes to not only the playoffs themselves but also the transfer portal, citing class time and NIL concerns.
“We've had so many disruptions over the last five-plus years that I think the time is now to not be reactive, be proactive," said Bjork. "When we had this setting here with the commissioners, our job was to provide feedback on what was it like to go through the 12-team playoff ... but it all gets impacted by the calendar. I felt it was important to lay that out with everyone in the room to say, separate from the CFP process, if we don't fix our calendar as an industry, then we're going to continue to have unintended consequences."
The countable athletically related activities (CARA) limits are the biggest pain point for Bjork. He told the CFP commissioners that because Ohio State’s classes resumed on January 6, his players had to balance the start of a new semester with winning a championship. CARA limits schools to 20 hours of practice time while classes are in session, and many of the Buckeyes surpassed that limit.
Bjork also pitched a restructuring of the transfer portal. “May makes the most sense to align player contracts with the portal,” he said. Bjork believes that a May transfer portal timeline would be the most impactful for revenue-sharing agreements.
CFP commissioners have previously considered shifting the season’s schedule to avoid a late-January playoff game, but this week, the 2025-26 schedule was partially released, and it does not reflect that change.
