Are bowl games really worth the hassle anymore, especially as Playoff expansion looms?

If running a bowl game wasn’t such a good business, you’d never have 43 of them piled on your holiday plate, including matchups like Texas State-Rice and SMU-Boston College that you’d never watch in any other context and wouldn’t ask for in the first place. 

For all of its warnings of doom and gloom, the bowl industry in America is so healthy that you could practically put any two teams in a stadium in December and there will be a TV network willing to show it and fans willing to pay for it. If that system hasn’t already collapsed in the College Football Playoff/transfer portal/opt-out era, it’s probably not going to anytime soon. There’s always somebody out there who can make a buck selling a bowl game.

But it’s not really the schools and it’s definitely not the players, which begs an important question: When the Playoff expands to 12 teams next year, will all of these other games really be worth the hassle? 

Among coaches and administrators across college sports, you’ll find no shortage of bowl-system defenders who cannot conceive of a world in which college football junks a 120-year-old tradition that began as a way for warm-weather cities to boost tourism in the winter. When you ask them why it’s important to preserve bowl games, they will mostly cite the importance of positive momentum to carry into the next season, the value of rewarding players for a job well-done and the extra practice time afforded to their coaches.

The contract bonuses are also nice: Athletics director Gene Smith, for example, gets a $35,000 Christmas present because Ohio State is playing in a New Year’s Six game, while its fan base seethes about losing once again to Michigan. 

In other words, the system is set up to keep going because there’s enough money to be made by enough stakeholders to keep it propped up in perpetuity. It doesn’t matter if a team has a bare-bones roster or a makeshift coaching staff; the games get played and somebody pockets the cash. 

But when you start asking people around the sport if they’re actually enjoying what this part of the year has become, that’s where you start to see some cracks in the foundation. 

As a business, the bowl system still works. As a worthwhile undertaking for everyone who isn’t participating in the CFP, there is more conflict than there ever used to be. 

And it’s easy to see why. 

Transfer portal, players opting out change landscape

One report Tuesday suggested that Texas A&M would have a maximum of 55 scholarship players available to play against Oklahoma State in the Texas Bowl.

Florida State is projected to be down roughly 20 players for the Orange Bowl, and several of Georgia’s stars are likely out as well.

The Sun Bowl between Notre Dame and Oregon State will be contested by two quarterbacks who threw a combined 26 passes this season. 

With a dozen players in the transfer portal and quarterback Caleb Williams opting out to get ready for the NFL draft, what is the actual point of 7-5 Southern California playing in the Holiday Bowl? At some point, when certain teams are down to one or two players at a position group, you have to wonder whether player safety is being compromised just by playing the game. 

There’s no going backward on these trends. With players now having the ability to transfer freely after the season and opting out no longer seen as a character flaw by NFL teams, most teams will show up to their bowl games as a shell of what they were during the season. When the playoff expands to 12 next year, the sense that these other games don’t matter to the players and the general public will only become more pervasive.

So what happens? Does college football just keep going on like this, squeezing the last bit of life out of a system that is stale and outdated just because it can? Or at some point, will they just chuck it because the returns keep diminishing year after year? 

Is there any value now to schools playing in bowl games?

For the first time in my life, I’m not so sure. Though it probably won’t happen anytime soon, you can now at least envision a world in which most of these bowls just fade away — not because they can’t work as a business but because the schools aren’t getting much value in playing them. The reality is that all but four (soon to be 12) coaching staffs in America have more important priorities in December than getting a team ready for the Pop-Tarts Bowl. 

“It’s a terrible system,” Mississippi coach Lane Kiffin told reporters Wednesday at the Peach Bowl in Atlanta. “I wouldn’t think any other sports, professional sports, have ever set up a system where free agency starts while the season is still going. It really makes no sense.

"You can leave, you can stay, you can go other places, coaches can call you and our season is still going. It would be like before the NFC or AFC playoffs start in a couple weeks, all of a sudden, hey, free agency the week before opens."

Kiffin is right, but he left out the most important reason it doesn't happen in the NFL: The players are compensated in a way that compels them to play and contractually obligated not to look for new employment until it’s time for free agency. And that part of the year doesn’t conflict with the playoffs because all of the stakeholders have agreed to that mutually beneficial arrangement through a collective-bargaining process.

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College football, having refused the notion that its athletes are employees, has no such protection. As a result, players will make decisions based on what’s in their self-interest. For an increasing number of them, playing an exhibition game in Shreveport or Fort Worth during the holidays is going to take a back seat to whatever they plan on doing next year. 

That’s the tradeoff college football has made: By refusing to pay players or even collectively bargain with them, the season effectively ends the first week of December, and so do their obligations to the team.

Unless big-time college programs embrace making athletes employees, that genie isn’t going back in the bottle. Even the idea of giving players NIL-based stipends for playing in bowls — something people in the industry have tossed around the last couple of years — seems unlikely to stem the tide (though it would clearly be the right thing to do).

12-team playoff will have major effect on system

College administrators understand this is a problem without a great solution. Any attempt to further restrict transfers is off the table because it won’t hold up in court, and there’s urgency for most of these transfers to find new homes during the semester break, which happens to coincide with bowl season. 

Meanwhile, coaches are distracted and overworked. Bowl prep is secondary to managing the transfer portal and securing high school recruits during the signing period that began last week.

And fan bases? Sure, there are a few that will always ride the momentum of a surprisingly positive season and get really fired up, like West Virginia fans snapping up their entire allotment of tickets and then some to the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. But unless a game is geographically convenient, it’s not easy for a school to break even playing in a bowl game when you add up all the logistical costs, the bonuses paid and the ticket blocks schools are obligated to buy (which aren’t always re-sold).

Most administrators have come up through the business believing there were all kinds of side benefits that made playing in any bowl game worthwhile, even if it meant financial losses. You’d hear a lot about the positives of taking student-athletes on a bowl trip or what it meant to a young coach to gain the credibility of playing in a postseason. 

But are those things worth it anymore when you’re showing up with little more than half of a functional team or a coaching staff that has been mentally checked out for weeks? 

Those attitudes have shifted some during the 10-year run of the College Football Playoff in its current form. I’m wondering if the mentality is going to accelerate even further away from the bowl system over the next decade as the 12-team playoff takes up even more of the oxygen and creates a wider divide between those who play in the real postseason and those who don’t.

The last generation of college administrators had a deep affinity for the bowl system and worked hard to make those games matter as much as possible. The next generation or two probably won’t be as kind. 

Remember how unusual it was when Stanford’s Christian McCaffrey decided not to play in the Sun Bowl in 2016? That was just seven years ago. Now, it’s standard operating procedure for most high draft picks. 

That’s worth keeping in mind when thinking about the future of these bowl games and what needs to change to keep them relevant. They’ll survive as long as the schools want them to. But the moment somebody decides they're no longer worth it, the floodgates will open and the system will come crashing down.