College Football Countdown
Countdown by Team
ACC
Big 12
Big Ten
SEC
Pac-12
Group of Five — American
Group of Five — C-USA
Group of Five — MAC
Group of Five — Mountain West
Group of Five — Sun Belt
About the college football countdown
What this page counts down to
The clock above tracks the next college football kickoff across the teams we follow, and it moves on by itself as each game finishes. Underneath, teams are grouped by conference, and every card carries that team’s next opponent and date with a link to a shareable full-screen countdown for the game. If you only care about one program, the team card is the fastest route to a clock you can put on a screen. If you want the seasonal question instead — how long until football is back at all — the days until college football page answers that one directly.
How the sport is organised
College football at the top level is a few hundred programs sorted into conferences, and the conference is the unit that matters: it determines who a team plays most weeks, which championship game it can reach, and often which bowl it lands in. Four conferences — the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC — sit at the top of the sport, with the American, Conference USA, the MAC, the Mountain West and the Sun Belt below them, plus a small number of independents that belong to no conference at all and build a schedule from scratch each year.
Membership moves. Programs change conferences between seasons, sometimes in groups, so the grid on this page is grouped by where teams play now rather than by where they historically sat.
How a season runs
The calendar is compressed and every week counts, which is the sport’s defining feature. A handful of games are played in the last week of August, before opening weekend proper on Labor Day weekend stretches across five days. Teams then play twelve regular-season games across roughly thirteen weeks.
Rivalry week is the weekend after Thanksgiving. Almost every long-standing rivalry is scheduled into it deliberately, several of them on the Friday, and it is the busiest single weekend of the regular season for countdown traffic on this site. The following weekend is conference championship weekend: each conference stages a title game, and the results reshuffle the national picture in a single afternoon.
Bowls and the playoff
The Sunday after championship weekend is selection day, when the playoff field and the full bowl lineup are announced at once. Bowl season then runs from mid-December to early January — dozens of games, most of them one-off matchups between teams from different conferences.
The College Football Playoff is a twelve-team bracket. The first round is played on campus, at the higher seed’s home stadium in December, which is the part that distinguishes it from every previous format. Quarter-finals and semi-finals are hosted by major bowls around New Year’s, and the National Championship is played in January at a neutral site announced years ahead.
Where the times come from
Kickoff times come from published schedule data and are shown in your device’s local time zone. College football flexes its television windows more aggressively than any other sport we cover: a large share of games are announced only six to twelve days ahead, so a fixture will often appear here with a date and no time. That is the schedule genuinely being unset, not missing data on our side, and it fills in on its own. See our data sources page for how often we refresh and what we fall back to.
Frequently asked questions
When does the college football season start?
A small slate of games is played in the final week of August, and the first full weekend is Labor Day weekend, running Thursday through Monday. The countdown at the top of this page always points at the next scheduled kickoff, so during the summer it is counting toward the opener and during the season it is counting toward the next game.
What is rivalry week?
The last weekend of the regular season, immediately after Thanksgiving, when the sport schedules almost all of its oldest rivalries at once. Many of these matchups have been played annually for over a century and carry trophies of their own. It is the single most-watched weekend of the regular season and, for a lot of programs, the game that defines the year regardless of the record.
How many teams make the College Football Playoff?
Twelve. Conference champions are guaranteed a share of the field, with the rest filled by at-large selections. The top seeds receive a first-round bye, the first round is played at campus sites in December, and the later rounds are hosted by major bowl games before the national championship in January.