On January 1, 1902, Michigan and Stanford met in the Tournament East-West Game. The game, which Michigan won 49-0, was the first of its kind: a postseason invitational game between two schools that played in different leagues. In other words, it was a bowl game. It was the first of its kind, and also the last of its kind, until 1916, when the game became an annual event. It’s now a tradition that has carried on for over 100 years. The Tournament East-West Game continues too. It changed its name to The Rose Bowl in 1923.
Bowls have been around nearly as long as the sport of college football itself, but it seems their time is nearing an end. It wasn’t long ago when players began opting out of bowl games to preserve their health and future value as athletes, but the first ones to do it were the players likely to be high draft picks. Then the mid-round players joined in.
Now teams are doing it.
Kansas State and Iowa State received $500,000 fines from the Big 12 for opting out of bowl games this year. Both teams felt that, in the wake of losing their coaches and transitioning to new leadership, they had better ways to spend their time than preparing for a bowl game with a makeshift coaching staff and a roster full of players uncertain about what their futures held for them at the college level.
Then Notre Dame joined in on the fun. The Fighting Irish, caught up in their feelings over being left out of the College Football Playoff, made the decision to end their season altogether. They took on the posture of righteous indignation, but who among us hasn’t been guilty of telling themselves anything they have to in order to justify their feelings?
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Regardless of the motivation or how anybody feels about it, what matters is the precedent set by the schools. The first player to opt out of a game let other players know it was OK to do so, and more followed suit. More programs will too.
Now, to be clear, this won’t become the norm. I don’t think we’ll see a bunch of bowl-eligible teams opting out in the coming years, at least not the 10-2 ones. It will mostly be teams dealing with changes in leadership, but the more teams that skip out on bowls, the more we’ll realize how little the bowls matter now.
For many college football fans, bowls have always been part of the experience. Events as fundamental to the sport as bands playing fight songs, tailgates and rivalry trophies. But most of those traditions have been warped and chipped away at by the College Football Playoff. The desire to maximize revenue and create an enticing product has destroyed the conferences most of those same fans grew up with. Bowls are no different. The College Football Playoff has damaged the value of the bowl games more than players opting out of them ever could.
Bowls had already begun to lose some of their best available options to the playoff when it expanded to 12 teams. That’s eight more teams they no longer got to choose from for their games. Tack on more schools opting out of games, and the pool of available teams becomes even thinner, which makes the games less attractive as television properties, which makes people sitting in boardrooms begin wondering if there are better ways to fill those blocs of television.
Maybe they can put on a rankings show instead? It’ll be great. They can rank teams in any order they choose and then come up with arbitrary reasons why they did so. Then, later in the show, they can just change them. Think of the engagement it could get on social media!
Anyway, a further threat to the bowls is the unending specter of further playoff expansion. Nobody believes the playoff will remain at 12 teams, and the “controversy” around this year’s playoff field will only lead to louder cries for expansion. Because if there’s anything we’ve learned about college football’s postseason, it’s that putting more teams in the playoff fixes all the problems. Once they take that bad boy to 16 teams, that’s four fewer teams available. And that’s assuming they stop at 16. Let’s not forget there have been 24-team proposals floated in recent months, too.
When the playoff does expand, how many of its new games will be played at neutral sites? You think the teams that earn byes in the current format don’t look at the teams who get to host first-round playoff games and think about how nice it would be to have that money too? The future of the College Football Playoff doesn’t include more teams, but more games played on campus, too, because everybody will want a taste of the action. This is a good thing. Playoff games on campus make for an incredible environment, and incredible environments make for awesome television.
But it won’t be nearly as awesome for the bowls. At least, not the ones who aren’t part of the rotation as host sites in the later rounds of the new playoff.
So, if you’re a fan of bowl games, enjoy them while you can. They won’t be around too much longer.
