It is an open question just how much longer the Army-Navy Game will have a college football weekend to itself.
Army and Navy have begun early discussions about the potential impact of College Football Playoff expansion on the scheduling of their annual rivalry game, Ben Portnoy of Sports Business Journal reported Saturday. The Army-Navy Game has aired in a standalone window on the weekend after the conference championship games for more than 16 years (save for 2020, when COVID-related scheduling adjustments resulted in the game taking place on a full Saturday of games). But an expanded CFP would presumably take place on that weekend.
Army superintendent Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland told Portnoy that the schools are realistic about the broader college football landscape. “We’ve got to try our best to protect that [standalone window], but we also understand the reality of the [CFP] with expansion and the second and third-order effects on conference championships, the regular season, and how that plays out. We can’t just say ‘Oh, we’re going to have our own game and our own day.’ We’ve got to be cognizant of that and, as a result, we have to be adaptable, too.”
Competition is already growing. Typically, Army-Navy has been the only FBS game of the day, but this year featured the LA Bowl between FBS schools Boise State and Washington.
Viewership for the Army-Navy Game has surged since the move to its current standalone window. The game averaged fewer than three million viewers in 2008 — the last year it aired on conference championship weekend — and immediately vaulted to 5.6 million after the scheduling change, steadily rising over the next decade to the neighborhood of 7-8 million. Last year’s game rose broke through that plateau with an audience of 9.4 million, the highest since 1989.
With both teams bowl eligible, the outcome decided in the final minutes, and Nielsen having changed its methodology in ways that generally benefit sports viewing, it would not be surprising if this year’s edition averaged an even larger audience.
Notably, the only time since 2008 that Army-Navy has been played on a full college football Saturday — the aforementioned 2020 season — it finished as the most-watched game of the weekend. (Keep in mind COVID cancellations impacted the schedule that day, most notably resulting in the cancellation of Ohio State-Michigan.)
Whether it stays on its current date or moves to another week of the season, the Army-Navy Game will remain on CBS for the foreseeable future. The network tacked an extra ten years onto its contract last year, which will now run through 2038.
