Let’s fix college bowl games

Let’s face it. We have a problem with college bowls.

First, there are way too many of them. Forty bowl games plus the championship game is way too many. Don’t get me wrong, I like college football. But when there are this many, it diminishes the accomplishment of reaching a bowl game. It used to be a big deal when you got to play that extra post-season game. But now 80 out of 128 teams will play in a bowl game. That’s five out of every eight teams. It seems that bowls have become an annual right for most teams rather than an occasional privilege.

As a result of the glut of bowl games, we have another problem: lesser teams playing in those bowls. Prior to last year, there were only four teams with a losing record in bowl games. This year and last year combined there will be six teams with a losing record. How can a team that didn’t even win half of their games be rewarded with a bowl game?

I understand why there are so many bowl games now: Money. More money for the schools. More money for the conferences. More money for the NCAA. Everyone could use more money. But where is the limit? Do we let the greed expand us to 50 bowls? 60 bowls? Why not 64 bowl games, including all FBS teams. Who wouldn’t want to see 1–11 Fresno State against 2–10 Texas State in a bowl game, outside of people in Fresno and San Marcos? At this point you’re just adding a 13th game to everyone’s schedule and a 14th for some. There has to be a cap on the greed. Plus, if we’re all agreeing that football is becoming an increasingly more dangerous sport full or concussions and other life-threatening injuries, why are we adding more games? Shouldn’t we be reducing the number of games? Shouldn’t we be stressing quality over quantity?

All this being said, I have some proposals on how we can improve college bowl games and college football in general.

Less Bowls, More Quality Games

The first time a sub-.500 team played in a bowl game was 2001. Let’s call that the beginning of the end and look at 2000 as being the model for reform.

In the year 2000 (cue the Conan bit), there were 25 bowl games. There were also less FBS (called Division I-A at that time) teams: 116. That’s right. We’ve added more bowl games (15) than FBS teams (12) in the last 16 years. We increased the number of bowl spots over number of teams two-and-a-half-fold.

Now that’s 50 out of 116 teams making bowl games, or about 43 percent. That seems about right. We should only be picking from the top half of the teams and about 3 out of 7 teams in bowl games is a good ratio. A team making a bowl with a losing record would be all but eliminated.

So if we apply that same ratio to the number of FBS teams today we get about 55 bowl spots. For those who think I’m crazy and we should actually have more bowl games, I’ll round that up to 56 for you guys. So that’s 28 bowl games. We need to get rid of 12 bowl games. We’ll get to that in a bit.

Back to the 11-Game Schedule

I have to address another thing from the 2000 season. Six-win teams were still fairly common in bowl games back then, but those teams were still over .500 since they were 6–5. Yeah, remember the 11-game college football schedule? We should go back to that.

To do that, we’re just getting rid of one non-conference game across the board. In fact, let’s get rid of that FBS-FCS game that the power five conferences play every year. Is it really necessary to watch Alabama beat an FCS team by four touchdowns every year?

I hear you. But what about Appalachian State vs. Michigan? Aren’t we losing out on those potential upsets? There will still be some FBS-FCS games, but only where a schedule needs to be filled and there aren’t any other FBS teams available. In fact, let’s make the worst team from the previous year in each of the five power conferences play a conference champion from the FCS and if they lose they have to trade conferences. College football needs to have relegation and promotion anyway.

Let’s Make an Eight-Team Playoff While We’re At It

You didn’t think I was just going to leave the playoff alone, did you? We have a four-team playoff right now, which is barely a playoff. I’ve always been a fan of going to six-teams, that’s all five power conference champions plus the best Group of Five team. But forget that. We’re going to eight.

All five conference champions plus three at-large teams will be in the playoff. And the three at-large teams can include up to two Group of Five teams: the highest ranked Group of Five, plus one more if they rank higher than any of the Power Five conference champions. The rest will be the highest ranked Power Five non-champions.

You’ll use six bowls for the playoff, plus a championship game. We’ll still rotate the two semi-final games like we do now, but the other four games will serve as a quarterfinals. Plus with all the conferences involved, you can maintain the original conference alignments in the bowls. You can still potentially have Big Ten vs. PAC-12 in the Rose Bowl. The only issue is having some teams play twice in those bowls, but wouldn’t we rather see Alabama play in the Sugar Bowl, and then if the win, in the Peach Bowl as well? Again, quality over quantity.

Let’s Chop Some Bowls

With two semi-final bowls taking their opponents from other bowls, that’s four less spots, or two less bowl games. That means we should only eliminate 10 bowl games to still have the promised 56 bowl spots.

A few more rules just to clean things up:

• Bowl games can only be in warm climates or indoors, with a few exceptions. For example, Boise is safe because of the blue turf.
• No team can play in their home stadium for a bowl game (not including the playoff). New Mexico and Hawaii are each playing in their own stadium for bowl games this year (although they’re not the home team, as if that matters).
• Only one bowl game per city.
• Bowl games need to have a name other than a corporate sponsor. Sponsors are fine (AutoZone Liberty Bowl) but it can’t be the only name (Russell Athletic Bowl).

If we’re agreeing that 2000 is the model to aim for, then any bowl that existed that year is fine to keep, with a few exceptions. So these bowls are safe:

Playoff Bowls: Orange, Peach, Fiesta, Cotton, Rose, and Sugar.
Other Bowls: Citrus, Gator (TaxSlayer), Outback, Holiday, Sun, Alamo, Insight.com (Cactus), Liberty, Independence, Music City, Las Vegas, Motor City, Humanitarian (Potato), and Mobile.

Four of the remaining five bowls from that year are defunct, including two in Hawaii, one in San Jose, and one in Houston. We still have bowls in these places, so we’re going to keep those around: the Hawaii Bowl, the Texas Bowl (Houston), and the Foster Farms Bowl (Bay Area), but we have to rename it the Foster Farms Silicon Valley Bowl.

The fifth one is the current Russell Athletic Bowl (or the MicronPC.com Bowl in 2000). This bowl fails two of the rules. First, it’s just named after a sponsor. Second, it’s in Orlando and we already have the Citrus Bowl there. So it’s the first one eliminated. While we’re at it, let’s go ahead and eliminate the third Orlando bowl this year, the AutoNation Cure Bowl.

Here are the other bowls we’re eliminating because there is already a bowl in those cities:

Miami area: Boca Raton Bowl, Miami Beach Bowl, St. Petersburg Bowl (these don’t even have a nice name like Orange Bowl, they’re just named after cities).

Dallas-Fort Worth area: Zaxby’s Heart of Dallas Bowl, Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl (again, just named after a city, and we already have the Military Bowl for the top service academy).

New Orleans: R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl (see notes on previous two).

San Diego: San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl (I actually like this name, so we’re going to merge it and call the bowl the National Funding San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Holiday Bowl — I’m not opposed to long names).

We just need to eliminate one more bowl, and since the Arizona Bowl was the most recently added, it makes sense to drop that one. But don’t worry, Tucson. We’re going to move the Cactus Bowl to you so that we don’t have two bowl games in the Phoenix area.

Now For the Matchups

Okay, we need to fix conference affiliations and eliminate 24 teams from this year’s bowls. This should be fun.

Let’s start with the playoff. It will be just like the basketball tournament (conference champions and at-large teams) and we can keep the original big bowl conference alignments.

The Cotton Bowl and Peach Bowl will still be our semi-final games, but the Cotton Bowl will be the highest seed remaining vs. the lowest seed remaining from the quarter-final bowls. The other two quarter-final winners will play each other in the Peach Bowl.

Here are the quarter-finals:

Rose Bowl: (Big Ten champ vs. PAC-12 champ) — #5 Penn State vs. #4 Washington
Sugar Bowl: (Big 12 champ vs. SEC champ) — #7 Oklahoma vs. #1 Alabama
Orange Bowl: (ACC champ vs. at large) — #2 Clemson vs. #15 Western Michigan
Fiesta Bowl: (at large vs. at large) — #3 Ohio State vs. #6 Michigan

Holy crap, an Ohio State-Michigan rematch! This is already worth it. Of course the at-large positions are arbitrary, but ideally you’re gonna go highest seed vs. lowest seed and so on down, hence Clemson vs. Western Michigan. Since we lose four spots for the semi-finals, unfortunately Wisconsin, Florida State, USC, and Auburn get kicked out of New Years bowls. That’s alright, we have other good bowl match-ups for them.

For the rest of the bowls, we end up eliminating everyone at or under .500, including two 5–7 teams, a 6–7 team, and 17 6–6 teams. Four 7–5 teams also get eliminated from bowl eligibility: Arkansas State, Eastern Michigan, Army, and Arkansas. For everyone else, congratulations, you made it.

Already some good things have happened. Some of the bowls we already eliminated featured only these newly ineligible teams. Those are just gone from our memories now. So forget everything about the Cure Bowl, New Orleans Bowl, St. Petersburg Bowl, and the Heart of Dallas Bowl. We also completely redrew two other bowls that featured 6–6 vs. 6–6. The Independence Bowl now has Miami vs. BYU, both 8–4. And the Quick Lane Bowl in Detroit? How about #8 Wisconsin vs. #11 Florida State? Boom! We’re making bowl games great again, including ones that were never great to begin with!

Okay, the conference alignments may not work out the way they did before, but some conferences lost a lot of tie-ins with these eliminations (the American Athletic Conference lost four spots). But everything is getting redistributed fairly.

So here are how the bowls look now, along with some better names:

Look how much better that is. Most of these games feature teams only a few games apart in record. There are a lot of ranked teams playing each other. And I’ll be you can’t even name all the teams we eliminated without having to look them up.

Of course I’m not going to admit everything about this is perfect. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Photo: Phil Roeder Iowa Beats Indiana (license)