Former Alabama QB and current analyst Greg McElroy has an idea to drum up interest from football fans who aren’t familiar with the college game.
Typically, as the college football season gets started, the NFL is still waiting to kick off. McElroy believes there’s some real estate to take up because of that.
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“What we should do, because there is no NFL, there is no competition, we own that weekend,” McElroy said Thursday on “Always College Football.”
“We have exclusivity over that weekend. We should make Week 1 the greatest spectacle of non-conference matchups that we can possibly imagine. And I’m talking, year-to-year, I know these schedules are scheduled way out in advance in some cases, like Clemson and Notre Dame,” McElroy explained.
“They agreed just last week to a 12-game series that starts in 2027 and running all the way through 2038. But, what I propose is, ‘Let’s make sure we have the biggest possible matchups for every Power 4 team on that Week 1. If that means triple-headers on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, then so be it,” McElroy said.
For over a decade now, the college football season has typically begun around Labor Day weekend, usually the first weekend of September.
“Monday’s a holiday,” McElroy said. “Let’s play a game at noon [ET], 3:30 [p.m ET]., and at 7 [p.m.] Load it up with marquee matchups across the board. We’re getting good matchups … We don’t have bad matchups. There are a lot of great games, but we could have more. And with the NFL on the sideline that weekend, it’s an opportunity to kick off our season in style.”
McElroy also proposed expanding Week Zero, which has become a popular way for fans to get their first true taste of college football each season.
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“Week Zero should be for the G5 and make the most matchups — most quality matchups you could possibly imagine — put those on Week Zero,” McElroy said. “So Week Zero is a G5 showcase. Week 1 a P5 [sic] showcase. And we can do more.
“So I think there is an opportunity that we can lean into with college football and make sure that, when we start the season, we’re starting with a huge bang that we can capture that audience that might not necessarily have an interest in college football when the NFL begins,” McElroy elaborated.
“But if we give them big-time matchups and marquee games scattered throughout the weekend that are unopposed in some windows, then maybe we can maybe recruit an NFL fan that becomes a college fan for the future.”
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