College football’s calendar chaos runs square into the biggest games of the season

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

Atlanta (CNN) — Somewhere between what had been a previously unimaginable football commute from Pasadena, California, to Bloomington, Indiana, the first day of January bled into the second.

The Indiana Hoosiers, fresh off eviscerating none other than Alabama at the high holy grounds of the Rose Bowl, pulled up to the John Mellencamp Pavilion around 3:30 in the morning, the business of the 2025 season still very much in front of them.

One door had not, per the cliché, closed. Yet, as the Hoosiers flew home, another door had, in fact, opened. The transfer portal, the door to either Alice’s Wonderland or the gates of Hades, depending on your viewpoint, opened at midnight on January 2. And so while his players slept, his fanbase celebrated and a semifinal game loomed, Curt Cignetti went into the office and met with recruits to talk about the next season.

Meanwhile, in Oxford, Mississippi, an equally giddy and slightly more vindictive fanbase had all of about 30 minutes to celebrate their team’s win. Then the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Day, leaving Ole Miss fans to wonder if their offensive coachmen might turn back into mice. Or, more accurately, in this case, rats.

Jilted by Lane Kiffin, Ole Miss nonetheless beat Georgia in the Sugar Bowl but Pete Golding, the new man in charge, wasn’t quite sure which of his coaches would be coming with him to prep for a semifinal date with Miami and who was making the short ride across the bayou to Baton Rouge.

As it turned out, Joe Cox and George McDonald abandoned ship. The tight ends coach and wide receivers coach joined Kiffin, allowing the Rebels to go on without them.

“Do they want to be here?” Golding said of his former co-workers. “Damn right they do.’’

While all of this was going on across the country, retro recruits (also known as high school seniors) were saying goodbye to their families, their pals and their proms. Early college enrollment beckoned, even if high school graduation hadn’t yet happened. They needed to get a jump on things to stake their claim on a roster, even if the same coaches who months earlier promised them the moon and the stars were currently recruiting over them by entertaining guys in the portal.

And in ordinary academic buildings and offices tucked up in the corners of the athletic department, university registrars and academic advisors were setting their hair on fire, trying to figure out how to approve transcripts and shoehorn new students into classes that were already full.

The college football calendar is a mess. That sentiment is now universal. But rather than merely try to undo what’s been done, perhaps it’s time to figure out what the point of it all is. Not only how college football got into this quagmire, but also if anyone is actually benefiting from it all. Rather than just fix the problem, the sport might want to identify what exactly the problem is.

“What I’ll say is … it has made football teams and it’s made coaches and players better at handling chaos,’’ Oregon head coach Dan Lanning said.

And then he laughed, somewhat ruefully.

Early enrollment

The transfer portal did not start the fire; it only added the accelerant.

If you untangle the mess that is now college football’s January and try to figure out where it all got sideways, it might be wise to go back to 1991. That’s when Georgia quarterback Eric Zeier decided to enroll in college a semester before graduating from high school. An exemplary student, Zeier took advantage of a dual enrollment program and made the jump from Marietta to Athens.

It was, however, easy to write Zeier off as an exception, not a norm, until a decade later, Maurice Clarett did the same at Ohio State. Clarett intentionally doubled down on classes in his junior season and took classes in the summer, all with the idea of jumpstarting his college progression.

When he led the Buckeyes to a national championship in 2003, the idea took root. By 2007, Florida brought nine kids in early and Clemson five more.

The argument for was simple: Enrolling early offered more time in the weight room and more time to acclimate to the rigors of college ball. Coaches could evaluate their whole team during spring ball, rather than wait to sort out starting rotations in the fall.

By 2017, the practice became so commonplace that the NCAA switched up the calendar, adding an early December signing day to the traditional February window.

This year, 32 players will get an early jump on college at USC.

Does it matter? Sometimes, yes. Trevor Lawrence enrolled at Clemson in January 2018 and started that September. And sometimes no. Arch Manning enrolled at Texas in January 2023. He started his first game this season, two years after he got to Austin.

Carter Smith arrived at Indiana in January 2022. An athletic offensive lineman who not only starred in the trenches but led his volleyball team to a state semifinal and 20 wins as a junior, he left Olentangy Liberty after his football season and went to Bloomington in January.

A few months later, his high school volleyball team won the state title.

“That wasn’t the greatest,’’ he says now. But Smith insists he would do it all over again.

“It really opened my eyes to how much more of the game I needed to learn,’’ he said. “If you decide to come early, that’s a big step in your career. There’s really no downside to it.’’

Smith wound up redshirting his freshman season.

Early commitments have never been guaranteed anything – not roster spots, not playing time – and getting recruited over is not new. A great player is great only until the next even greater player comes along at his position.

But the advent of the transfer portal has made the hope for a return investment even flimsier. Given the chance to grow a linebacker over time or plug in an experienced older one right now, coaches are going old every time.

There are only 105 spots on a college football roster, and little time to waste in a win-now culture. Consequently, while an early enrollment may show a player’s commitment to the program, there is no promise that said commitment will be returned.

In January 2024, Parker Livingstone, a Texas native who long dreamed of wearing the burnt orange, happily left his high school for Austin. He wound up redshirting as a freshman but became a starter this year for the Longhorns, catching 29 passes from his roommate Arch Manning. Livingstone just transferred to Oklahoma.

“Never in a million years did I think I would be going into the portal looking for a new home,’’ he wrote on his Instagram post. “Some things are out of my control. Such is the reality of the ever-changing landscape of college football.’’

Two days later, Texas brought Auburn wide receiver Cam Coleman to campus for a visit.

Academics

Oregon started its winter semester on Monday. Indiana and Miami begin the semester on January 12, with Ole Miss commencing January 20. The portal closes on January 16.

So let’s talk about the other calendar that nobody thinks about: the academic calendar.

College football players are still, by definition at least, students. To be eligible to compete, they have to be enrolled in classes and making progress toward a degree. Except at most schools, spring classes not only start before the portal begins, but the deadlines to drop or add classes are usually well before January 16.

A simple question then: how?

“It is,’’ says Kyle Ross, the executive director of NACADA, a not-for-profit that offers networking for academic advisors, “a lift.’’

In a normal transfer world, one not involving a football player weighing multiple offers as or after the semester has started, an academic advisor will spend a few days reviewing a transcript.

Sometimes, it’s easy. A state school move to another state school is fairly uncomplicated, with most courses already scrubbed and articulated into the system. A transcript for a student moving from one state to another, or from a select private school to a big state school, might need a little extra time to review.

It gets even trickier for upperclassmen who are trying to get upper-level coursework to count as credits. It’s not unusual for a faculty member to get involved and review syllabi to make sure the classes stack up to the new school’s standard.

“In the best scenario, we can get it done in 48 hours,’’ Ross says. “But with what’s being asked with football transfers, it can be as tight as 24 hours or less. People get frustrated because they need information and they need it fast.’’

Approving transfer credits, though, is only the beginning. Transferring students – and even football players – have to have a class into which to transfer. By the time most football players are looking to transfer, regular students have long since crafted their new schedule.

Most courses, Ross said, leave room for emergency additions – say five open places for a 30-person class – but a hefty transfer class can become a simple numbers crunch. An administrator at one Power 5 school who asked not to be named told CNN Sports that faculty at their institution had been asked to hold as many as 70 spots for possible new football players.

“The closer to the start of the semester you get, the tougher it is,’’ the administrator said. “Miracles can happen and mountains, I know, have been moved, but it’s not easy.’’

And at what cost? No doubt few are concerned about such things as academic success, but Ross is. He worries about students enrolling in an 11-week class three weeks after it started.

“That, I know, creates even more frustration for the faculty,’’ he said. “They allow someone into their class, but they’re thinking to themselves, ‘I really shouldn’t be letting them in now. I’m only setting them up for failure.’”

Coaches

This is, of course, what started the current round of handwringing and – as usual – Lane Kiffin got the sport boiling.

He not only went through a messy divorce with Ole Miss, exiting just as the Rebels started their playoff march; he doubled down by then making it clear he expected the assistants who were joining him at LSU to choose portal recruiting over semifinal coaching.

The truth is, LSU and Kiffin remain the exception, not the norm. James Madison’s Bob Chesney is the new UCLA head coach; he didn’t leave for Westwood until after the Dukes lost. Oregon’s offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator both accepted head coaching jobs elsewhere – Will Stein at Kentucky and Tosh Lupoi at Cal.

Both worked the portal for their new employers this weekend and both will be on the sidelines on Friday night when the Ducks face Indiana.

“The timing isn’t perfect,’’ Lanning said of his staff’s fluidity, “but it’s been done before.”

It is certainly not ideal that coaches have to split time between recruiting and game prep at such a critical part of the season, but that’s hardly new. College basketball coaches routinely fly out on the heels of an afternoon practice to scout a recruit, and zip back the next day.

Does it look squishy? Sure. Is it impossible? No.

Besides all of this, the January crunch stems from the Wayback machine, to the coaches seeking a way to corral their entire roster on campus long before the first game kicks off.

“For me, it’s been a philosophy of take the calendar, what fits best for us, how can we work the calendar to be an advantage to us in how we run our program,’’ Minnesota’s PJ Fleck told the New York Times six years ago. “For us, it’s all about getting a jump-start on next year.’’

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.