College football playoff ratings have plummeted on New Year's Eve since 2014

… after major drop of 23 percent for 2015 title game 

For years, New Year's Day was synonymous with college football bowl games. Then came the BCS and now the CFP, and the semifinal and championship games are no longer being played on Jan. 1.

Was that move to play the semifinal games on New Year's Eve two years ago a wise decision by ESPN and CFP?

In 2015, the New Year's Eve semifinal games dropped 40 percent in television viewership from 2014. There was a slight bump back up this year as the Clemson-Ohio State game in the evening was up six percent, a 10.4 instead of a 9.8 last year, according to the Sporting News.

The earlier Alabama-Washington game had a 10.9 rating, which is an increase of 12 percent from last year.

However, the bottom line for ESPN is that this is still a drop of about 32 percent from two years ago, so a course correction may be needed.

Part of the improvement this year could have been because the games were played on a Saturday.

However, the frightening part of this for ESPN is that the 2016 football title game in January between Alabama and Clemson dropped 23 percent from the previous year, according to a January story in the New York Times.

The Times noted that many reasons could have contributed to the decline last year. "The smaller audience could have been because the title game was not the novelty it was last year, when it made its debut; because it was a matchup of two Southern teams; or because Clemson is not as well known to a national audience as Alabama or either of the teams that played last year."

The 2014 contest was between Ohio State and Oregon.

Alabama and South Carolina are not major media markets. The audience must be attracted by college football itself, but the scary part of this for ESPN is that the NCAA basketball championship last year attracted a larger audience than the football title game, which is a major sea change.

ESPN signed a deal with CFP in 2012 for $5.64 billion over 12 years. It had better right the ship or it could be bleeding red ink for a while as advertisers flee the vessel.