In a rare moment of flexibility for “The Granddaddy of Them All,” the Rose Bowl is moving up an hour.
This season’s Rose Bowl is scheduled to begin at 4 PM ET, up from the usual 5 PM ET start, ESPN announced Tuesday. The move will allow the Sugar Bowl to begin at 8 PM ET, rather than the 8:50 start time that had been necessitated in past years.
In a statement through ESPN, College Football Playoff executive director Rich Clark said the move was the result of “thoughtful collaboration” between ESPN, the CFP and each of the three New Year’s Day bowls — including the Orange Bowl, which will move up to Noon ET.
The Rose Bowl has long been an impediment to optimizing the College Football Playoff schedule, largely owing to its insistence on remaining in its traditional early evening New Year’s Day timeslot. Much of that intractability has been based on the aesthetic of its iconic sunset, which typically occurs late in the third quarter. Sunset this coming year would be around 7:54 PM ET, by which point the game may well have concluded. This past year’s Rose Bowl telecast lasted little more than three hours.
There were no other meaningful changes to the schedule for the CFP quarterfinals, semifinals and national championship. The four quarterfinal — the Cotton Bowl — is again set for primetime on New Year’s Eve. The semifinals are again set for the Thursday and Friday following the quarterfinals. The national championship is locked into Monday nights for the foreseeable future. All of those above-mentioned games are set for a 7:30 PM ET start.
No information was announced for the first round games, two of which faced direct competition from the NFL last year.
