TERRY COLUMN: College football playoff has terrible timing

There’s a limit to my fandom.

It will be tested tonight.

My alma mater, Michigan State, is in the second annual College Football Playoff, playing Alabama in the Cotton Bowl for a chance to play in the national championship game.

This is wonderful.

The entire time I was in East Lansing, the team was garbage.

Garbage would probably be more palatable. The team was an underacheiving scrap heap of talent.

It would go up 16 points on Notre Dame after three quarters just to give up 19 unanswered in the fourth. It would score 21 straight to take a 10-point lead against Michigan only to give up two touchdowns in the final minutes and lose. It would consistently win the first five games of the season and lose the rest.

Making a bowl game was precious when I was a student.

So now, with Michigan State competing for a national title, I feel like all those hard times have paid off.

I really want to watch this bowl game.

I also don’t want to be a loner.

As part of top-level college football’s new playoff system, the semifinals this year and next — and two out of every three years under the current 12-year contract — will be played on New Year’s Eve.

As a consequence, the first game, the Orange Bowl between top-ranked Clemson and No. 4 Oklahoma, will start at 4 p.m. in the East, 1 p.m. in the West: in the middle of a work day on the last day before a holiday.

The final game, the one I’m interested in, starts at 8 p.m. in the East, 5 p.m. in the West. Should the game kick off on time, it will finish with just enough time to watch the ball drop on the campuses of Michigan State and Alabama. Should it be pushed back because the Orange Bowl runs long, very likely with a pair of pass-heavy offenses, many fans will miss the normal festivities entirely.

Out here, the final game starts just late enough to ruin any plans or at least earn sports fans cold looks from their friends who’d like to turn the focus away from the TV.

The worst part? It could all be avoided.

The games, only moved because of the insistence by the Rose and Sugar bowls to remain on Jan. 1, could have been moved to the weekend. As the calendar shifts, it could be played on the first Saturday of January, a simple solution that leaves the year’s biggest games on college football’s most iconic day of the week.

Instead, the people in charge of building the new playoff chose to ruin the evening of thousands across the country. More selfishly, they ruined mine.

Maybe everything will run on time and I’ll get to enjoy the entire game before all the festivities start. Even better, Michigan State will be up four touchdowns and I’ll be able to turn away early.

More likely, I’ll bail on the game after the third quarter, even if it’s close, so I can head out to meet friends. I’ll glance at my phone a few hundred times until the game ends but I won’t miss out on the fun.

It’s too bad. The new playoff is a breath of fresh air and a needed respite from the old guessing game of determining a national champion.

The timing is just off.

From one concerned fan, I hope they get it right in the future.