Is 2025 when College Bowls Die?

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Its all heading to the elimination of most of college football. When they go to a ridiculous 16 playoff format, there will more more attrition from invites to the fringe bowls leading to less opportunities. Its going to a 25 team pool of teams that compete for 16 spots. Much of the BIG, SEC and others will never participate with any regularity in that pool. Only the big money programs will be there and could it get anymore boring? The Indiana story is a once in a lifetime thing.
 

MaxyJR1 said:
My problem is that this is not different than the NFL where a team might just have a bad day or match-up in a big game.
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That is what set the college football season apart from every other regular season out there. Those were the AWESOME games that would happen at least 2 Saturdays every month, if not 3 or 4.

I get that not all people care about that, but there are a lot of us that do.
 

1983 said:
Its all heading to the elimination of most of college football.
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Or at least sending it back to what it was in the 80's when you kinda knew which few teams actually had a chance, and your team was most likely gonna be an also-ran.

Then party started happening and the popularity took off. And now the opposite of parity is happening.
 







disco said:
What we COULD be seeing, is the P4 teams largely competing for a playoff, and the G6 teams playing in bowls. Essentially dividing division 1 into FCS-A, FBS, and FCS-B.
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Can you clarify what you mean here? FCS has its own playoffs and championship.
 




WAGopher said:
Tidbit from that tweet link:

Georgia Tech coach Brent Key said he has a list of 36 names for the offensive coordinator opening and said he won't rush the process. "I'm going to take the time to get this thing right."

Can PJ can take a hint?
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PMWinSTP said:
Can you clarify what you mean here? FCS has its own playoffs and championship.
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Right. What I meant, and this was just spitballing, is that in theory, we could see the P4 playing a post-season tournament. The G6 playing in bowl games, and the FCS and all lower levels also playing in their existing tournaments.
 



corcorangopher said:
Bowl games have been slowly dying for a while.

First it was too many so they were watered down.
Then stupid sponsor names so you didn’t even know where or why the game existed.
Letting 6-6 teams play. Heck, having 5-7 teams get Bowl Games.

Rose Bowl losing its purpose.

Playoff becoming all that matters.

Players declining to play.

Now teams declining to play.

I used to like Bowl season….and Pizza Hut.
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The bowls were becoming rapidly irreverent with player opt outs and coaching firings and hirings. The bowls were slowly returning to their exhibition roots.

But with the playoff, future growth of the playoffs, and now entire teams opting out of bowl season I feel the writing is on the wall.

At least it hasn't been a shock to the system. This has been happening over time, systematically. It hasn't been a rip the band aid off pain to be missing them. It has been a slow process of learning not to care about them.

It should make it easier to finally just do away with them completely and expand the playoff to 16 or even 24 teams. If there are more than 16, have as many as two rounds of play-in games followed by a couple rounds of higher seed hosted rounds - leaving 4 to 8 teams left for New Year's bowl games and a huge day on TV. As I have always said, maximize automatic qualifiers and minimize "eye test" human input that eternally would make the SEC unsufferable. Perhaps use the committee or rankings to seed the tournament, but not select the teams.
 

You know what might be WAY more fun than random bowl games and likely draw even more eyeballs on TV? Conference crossover games. After the playoff bids are announced, go down the list of teams and match them up by order of conference finish until you run out of .500 teams. SEC vs. B1G, ACC vs. B12, MWC vs. CUSA, etc. This year would’ve produced the following B1G matchups:

USC vs. Texas
Mich vs. Vandy
Iowa vs. Mizzou
Wash vs. Tennessee
Illinois vs. LSU
Minnesota vs. UK (losing record - could include or sub a team from another conference)
Nebraska vs. Florida (see above)
NW vs. Auburn (see above)
 


MGGopher said:
You know what might be WAY more fun than random bowl games and likely draw even more eyeballs on TV? Conference crossover games. After the playoff bids are announced, go down the list of teams and match them up by order of conference finish until you run out of .500 teams. SEC vs. B1G, ACC vs. B12, MWC vs. CUSA, etc. This year would’ve produced the following B1G matchups:

USC vs. Texas
Mich vs. Vandy
Iowa vs. Mizzou
Wash vs. Tennessee
Illinois vs. LSU
Minnesota vs. UK (losing record - could include or sub a team from another conference)
Nebraska vs. Florida (see above)
NW vs. Auburn (see above)
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The Big Ten and the SEC might just be money hungry enough to go for another cash grab and put this postseason "challenge" idea up for TV bid. Some broadcast institution (ESPN, FOX, NBC, Prime, Netflix, TBS, someone) would pay big money for that package of games (could include even more if you include sub-.500 teams who have some cache.) The games would feature some name brands every year and would definitely draw ratings and would be a step up from simple bowl exhibition games because conference pride would be on the line.
 

Regardless of how meaningless most bowls are now days, the bowl season along with Christmas/New Years might rank right up there with the NCAA tourney for me. Coaches have more fun with the play calling so it makes for more entertaining games.

The more teams opt out and the eventual elimination of some bowl games will decrease my interest in college football in general.

An idea I've seen floating around is to have a second tournament similar to the NIT in basketball but have there be some money incentives for winning so more players opt in to play in it.
 

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