What will happen to college football bowl games? Who cares!
The proposed 12-team College Football Playoff has the sports world in a tizzy, and everybody has an opinion.
I personally like it — which I got into last week — but I understand the opinions of people who think that jumping from four teams to 12 teams is too radical. But I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that some people are tepid about this format because they’re worried about how it will affect the bowl system.
It already seems like a bizarre concession that the proposed format calls for the quarterfinals and semifinals to be held at bowl sites instead of on campus. The details of how exactly that would work haven’t yet been determined, but Texas A&M athletic director Ross Bjork is already expressing concerns about the playoff having a negative effect on most bowl games.
It begs the question: Does anyone — outside of the bowl executives that make six-digit salaries and their pals — actually care about bowl games in 2021?
TV viewership for these games has been on a decline for several years. Attendance at a bunch of these games hit record lows in the months before the COVID pandemic. And elite players are regularly opting out of bowl games to protect themselves from getting injured in these meaningless exhibitions months before the NFL Draft.
Bowl games aren’t what they used to be
College football fans understand there was a time in history when winning a major bowl game was the goal of all the top programs.
But a lot has changed since then.
First, there are way, way more bowl games. In 1970, there were 11 bowl games. In 1990, there were 19. This upcoming winter, there are 42 bowl games scheduled, not counting the National Championship Game. Reaching a bowl game just doesn’t mean what it used to mean.
The prestige of playing in a top-tier bowl game became watered down by the current College Football Playoff format, in which teams that reach the top non-playoff bowls aren’t seen as teams that had great seasons, but rather as teams that came up just short of making the playoff.
And when you look back at the days when the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl made New Year’s Day the sport’s biggest day of the year, remember that those teams had nothing else to play for at the end of the season. If a playoff existed back then, you can bet those top teams would have valued winning a national championship over winning whatever bowl game their conference had a contract with.
There’s also way more money to be made in the NFL than ever before. Top players aren’t going to risk their health to play in a game that their fans aren’t even invested in.
There’s still a place for bowl games, just not an important one
There are a few nice things about bowl games.
They provide quality football entertainment during the holiday season. Many of them are played in fun places, making them a enticing trip for fans. And the extra practice time that comes with playing a bowl game can be make a big difference for mediocre programs looking to build for the following year.
Similar things can be said about the men’s basketball NIT. Teams that miss the NCAA Tournament play in that tournament, mostly on days that the Big Dance isn’t happening, with the semifinals and finals held at the World’s Most Famous Arena.
There was a time that the NIT was a really big deal, but the NCAA didn’t try to placate the NIT as it built up its own tournament. Instead, it overtook the NIT and left that tournament to figure out its place in men’s college basketball.
As college football joins the 21st Century with a larger playoff system that keeps more of the country engaged throughout the season, we should start to look at bowl games the same way we look at the NIT. They can stick around (well, maybe not all 42 of them) for the teams that don’t make the playoff.
But there’s just no reason that the bowls should have a serious place in the college football anymore. There’s no reason the quarterfinals of a 12-team playoff should be taken out of raucous home environments to be played in corporate NFL stadiums.
Most of all, there’s no reason that powerful people in college athletics, like Ross Bjork, should even be thinking about the bowl games. They should be busy creating a perfect playoff format. The bowls aren’t important anymore; leave them behind and let them figure out their own future.
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