How College Football Playoff Teams Are Balancing Academics With Sport

When the Penn State Nittany Lions conduct their walkthrough practice Friday on the eve of playing the SMU Mustangs in the College Football Playoff, some players will be missing. They’ll be taking final exams elsewhere on campus.

This is a new issue in gridworld, at least at the FBS playoff level. After decades of holding firm against the sport trespassing on final exams, academia finally gave in and sold out. Finals Week, long a no-play zone, is now just another week in which to fit academics around football.

Some of the eight first-round playoff teams had finals last week, or an overlap of last week and early this week. But four of them—Penn State, SMU, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Indiana Hoosiers—are prepping for the playoffs and taking the biggest tests of the semester simultaneously. SMU at least wrapped up exams on Wednesday; the team will fly to State College, Pa., on Friday. Penn State kept its exam schedule largely the same. At Indiana and Notre Dame, testing was being compressed and rearranged due to a Friday kickoff.

Add this to the list of campus conflicts created by mixing a longer season with an academic calendar that hasn’t changed much in roughly forever. Since before football was invented, American higher education has had an academic year that wraps around the holidays—and the final act of the first semester is exam week. Here in 2024, that’s also the first round of the expanded playoff.

“I think we’d be foolish to say it’s not the money driving things,” Penn State faculty athletics representative Dennis Scanlon, a professor of health policy and administration, says. “The economics of the situation have dictated where we’ve gone—without, frankly, any kind of serious consideration of the academic component.”

Fortunately, many of the schools gave consideration to the potential conflicts on their own months in advance.

Way back in April, with an eye on hosting a potential playoff game, Penn State moved winter graduation from Saturday to Sunday. That gave families of graduates a chance to reserve State College hotel rooms at something less than the notorious football weekend prices. The school also is keeping the dorms open until Sunday for students who are staying past the end of their exams to attend the playoff game.

Notre Dame made a similar anticipatory move in August. Exam week traditionally has spanned Monday to Friday, but the school decided in August to start earlier (Saturday for some) and end earlier (Thursday morning).

That proved especially prescient with the Irish hosting a Friday game. If they’d hosted on Saturday, school faculty athletics rep Tricia Bellia said they would have had to reschedule only 13 final exams. But there was no way to adequately host a massive influx of fans on campus while simultaneously ensuring the necessary logistics and quiet for exams for all students on Friday, so 140 tests were moved to Thursday.

“It was literally an untenable situation,” says Bellia, a law school professor at Notre Dame. “When the decision was made, we did have some isolated faculty comments about whether football should take precedence. But I would say the vast majority of faculty understood why we were doing it. These are completely uncharted waters.”

Instead of a completely new exam schedule, SMU aligns its finals with when classes have been offered all semester. That allowed the Mustangs to keep their usual morning practice routine while taking finals in the afternoons from Dec. 12 to 18.

“That’s good, but it doesn’t necessarily address preparing for those finals while also preparing for the biggest game of their lives,” says SMU faculty athletics rep Paul Rogers, a law professor and former dean of the law school. “It presents a lot of challenges on the academic side, for sure.”

One development that has alleviated some of the football-finals crunch: Schools are more flexible in the post-pandemic world regarding timing and location of exams. There are more online tests, and there is a greater variance in when an exam must be completed. The days of needing to be sitting in a certain classroom for a set period of time to take an exam aren’t gone—Scanlon said some Penn State players will miss meetings this week to give speeches or presentations for final grades—but there are more alternatives now.

“This week will always be an important week,” Scanlon says. “But the academic piece has been changing since COVID.”

Most schools are intentional about not scheduling many competitions during finals—including the four playoff teams that are in finals this week. All four are off in men’s and women’s basketball for at least a week during their finals period, and the Notre Dame and Penn State men’s hockey programs have multiple weeks off. Everyone knows class time will be missed during a season, but this is the time of the semester when schools try to minimize it.

“Our players are used to having class and competing,” Bellia says. “Finals adds a different weight.”

The unsung—and often overworked—heroes of the athletic department at this time of year are the academic counseling and support units. They’re involved on a year-round basis with players, but they’re especially valuable heading into finals by identifying which athletes need the most help or are at risk of not passing classes.

“I would be lying if I said there’s not more being fit into the schedule,” Scanlon says. “But we’ve tried to get ahead of it. From everyone I’ve talked to at the Morgan Center [Penn State’s athletic academic headquarters], we’re in good shape. But the proof will be in the pudding when we see the grades in January.”

Even when finals end this week, there is more to be done for the academic unit. The transfer portal is a continuous font of work.

Assessing the transcripts of incoming transfers has become a massive undertaking, commensurate to the number of athletes on the move. Satisfactory progress toward a degree at the old school is one thing; making sure the credits transfer and apply at the new school is another. Given the finite amount of time that the transfer portal is open—and the fact that most universities are simply shut down for at least the last week of the calendar year—this is crunch time.

“The midyear transfers present a real problem academically,” Rogers says.

Faculty athletic reps—or FARs, as they’re known in college sports parlance—have a unique perspective on campus. They have a foot in both the academic and sports realms, keeping lines of communication open with both the athletic academic counseling departments and the coaches and athletic directors.

They can hear a lot of complaining from one side about the other, but also constructive feedback. The role is primarily attuned to facilitating success for athletes in their studies while maintaining the academic mission of the school. Almost all of them are generally supportive of the role athletics plays on campus, and simultaneously protective of the athletes.

While all three FARs interviewed for this story acknowledged the added academic stress the playoff places on the football teams lucky enough to be in it, they see other issues as larger problems. Primarily, the physical and mental demands associated with lengthening the season well into January.

“I certainly have concerns about academic impact,” Scanlon says. “But I also have concerns about the physical toll and the mental-health toll. The constant, year-round repetition without a break is something we’ve all discussed.”

At Penn State, which is accustomed to playing bowl games on or around New Year’s Day after completing its regular season weeks earlier, the normal rhythm is this: limited practices during finals week, followed by a brief trip home for the holidays, then reconvening on Dec. 26. This time around, it’s been intense football emphasis straight through—especially with an appearance in the Big Ten championship game eating up another week.

The game in Indianapolis was an unexpected development, made possible by the Michigan Wolverines’ massive upset of the Ohio State Buckeyes on Nov. 30. Not winning it accelerated the timetable for the next game—instead of being off until a Rose Bowl quarterfinal, it was back to the grind for this first-round game.

Each playoff win extends the season and eliminates potential downtime between academic terms. The two teams that go all the way to the Jan. 20 title game are likely to miss the start of spring semester classes in January.

While these are among the most elite players in college football, most of them will—to use the NCAA’s catch phrase—still go pro in something other than sports. But this is also a lifetime highlight for all participants.

“From an academic perspective, I do feel for the players and the level of exhaustion, and the lack of an ability to go home and have a true break—they need a clear mental and physical break,” Bellia says. “But I talked to many former players who said they would give anything to be in position to travel that journey that this team is on.”