“College football season should end Jan. 1,” the Oregon head coach told Yahoo Sports in an interview from Big Ten media days on Wednesday. “That solves a lot of the problems that exist.”

Shifting up the college football season — long a discussion point among college administrators — would result in what Lanning says will be a more condensed playoff, one spread across five weeks instead of seven, and one that does not, he said emphatically, include long byes for teams.