The NFL and college football are locked in an escalating broadcast battle
The NFL’s 2025 schedule puts it in direct competition with college football, challenging a decades-old law that once kept the peace. From Black Friday to Christmas Day, the broadcast battlefield is getting crowded—and college football may be the underdog.
The full 2025 NFL slate was unveiled last week. And, besides flooding FYP pages with sometimes unhinged schedule-release videos, it sets up multiple broadcast conflicts with college football—continuing a trend that threatens to upend a decades-long balance kept in place by a law established when JFK was working out of the Oval Office.
Sundays are for the NFL, Saturdays are for the boys and college football
After the NFL’s first attempt to sell its television rights en masse to CBS in the early 1960s was blocked by the courts as an antitrust violation, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle went to Congress to get an exemption, arguing that the league needed to pool its rights for smaller-market franchises like the Green Bay Packers to survive.
At the same time, college sports leaders, concerned about losing their long-established Saturday broadcast dominance, lobbied Congress for protections.
This owners-lawmakers-leaders back-and-forth ultimately resulted in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 (SBA), which laid out scheduling rules for the football season. Between the second Saturday in September and the second Saturday in December, the NFL is effectively barred from scheduling games:
- Later than 6pm on Fridays
- Between noon and midnight on Saturdays
Peep this year’s conflicts: The NFL and college football are going head-to-head on the first Friday in September, Black Friday (November), and in late December—all arranged around this carved-out window. The NFL's Black Friday game is slated to start at 3pm, so it’ll be largely over by the time the 6pm cap kicks in.
Probably a good thing for college football…which in head-to-head matchups have been easily beat up on like a younger brother. Last December, two regular season NFL games were played on the same day as the first round of the College Football Playoff—and each of the regular season NFL games handily outdrew the CFP broadcasts.
Looking ahead: The SBA may be revisited in upcoming years to a) establish new guidelines in the face of NFL expansion and/or b) grant college sports a similar antitrust exemption (something a college super league would need to negotiate a media rights deal). Plus, another behemoth head-to-head broadcast matchup is brewing: the NFL has decided to go all-out on Christmas, a day historically reserved for the NBA.
