The first year of a 12-team College Football Playoff will kick off with a first-round game on Dec. 20 and conclude with the title game one month later at Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
The CFP announced its entire schedule for the upcoming season on Wednesday. Although the dates of playoff games for both the 2024 and 2025 seasons were revealed in May 2023, the latest announcement included the details of kickoff times and TV information.
The quartet of first-round games will be on Dec. 20 and 21. ABC and ESPN will televise games on both that Friday and Saturday with an 8 p.m. Eastern kickoff in both cases, while TNT will have a pair of Dec. 21 games at noon and 4 p.m. Those afternoon games will go up against a pair of NFL regular-season games as the Houston Texans visit the Kansas City Chiefs at 1 p.m. and the Baltimore Ravens visit the Pittsburgh Steelers at 4:30 p.m.
Mike Mulvihill, Fox president for insights and analytics, thinks there will be room to accommodate both audiences. Fox has the Ravens-Steelers game as it goes up against the CFP's late afternoon matchup.
"I think it will be fine for the NFL and college football to coexist on that date. I think both events will rate just fine," he said.
The pairings for the four first-round games, which will be played on college campuses, will be announced on Dec. 8 as the first-ever 12-team field is revealed. The CFP, which replaced the Bowl Championship Series beginning with the 2014 season, has been a four-team event to date, with semifinal matchups from the New Year's Six rotation setting up the national championship game.
In the new format, TNT has a pair of games through a sublicense with ESPN. ESPN's $7.8 billion deal with the CFP, which was announced in March, allowed it to sublicense games to other networks. Financial terms of the sublicense were not announced.
The quarterfinals, semifinals and championship game will all be shown on ESPN.
The top four conference champions as ranked by the CFP selection committee will receive first-round byes. The quarterfinals will begin on Dec. 31 with the Fiesta Bowl at 7:30 p.m. New Year's Day will kick off with the Peach Bowl at 1 p.m., followed by the Rose Bowl in its traditional 5 p.m. spot and then the Sugar Bowl at 8:45 p.m.
The semifinals are the Orange Bowl on Jan. 9 and the Cotton Bowl on Jan. 10. Both have 7:30 p.m. start times, along with the championship game on Jan. 20 in Atlanta. Georgia's capital will become the first city to host a CFP final for a second time, and the bar was set high for entertainment the first time around when Alabama beat Georgia 26-23 in overtime in January 2018 to cap the 2017 season.
ESPN will announce its schedule for most of the bowl games on Thursday.