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…
