Bowls could get makeover by 2020
Colleges, executives looking at options
Meaningless bowls. Too many bowls. Made-for-TV bowls. Shrinking bowl attendance.
There have never been more bowl games, and three years into the College Football Playoff era there are more questions than ever about why these games are being played at all. Especially when high-profile players such as Christian McCaffrey and Leonard Fournette choose to skip the postseason to protect their bodies for the NFL draft.
There is currently an NCAA imposed freeze on the creation of new bowls that caps the field at 40 through 2019. Over the next few years the people invested in the bowls — commissioners, athletic directors and bowl executives — will consider ways to improve the bowl system and answer the question: What should bowls be?
Chances are there will be fewer bowls, data-driven limitations on how many bowls a conference can lock in and maybe even postseason games played on campus. But for those who long for the days when there were a dozen or so bowls that rewarded only the very best teams in college football, well, you might as well wish for the return of leather helmets.
Everyone seems to agree that while the bowl system is not perfect, it does not need to be razed.
Andy Bagnato is a former sports writer who also worked for four years as a public relations executive for the Fiesta Bowl. He now runs Bagnato Pflipsen Communications, a consulting firm that helped Phoenix land the this year’s Final Four and last year’s College Football Playoff championship game.
“The question for people in college football is: What’s the utility of the bowl?” Bagnato said. “Is it a great trip for your alumni? For your student-athletes? Is it television exposure for four
hours for your program? Is it a branding exercise for the school and for a conference? For the communities I think the questions become: Are they tourism magnets? Is the utility of a bowl game the fact that it attracts tourists? All those are factors.
“I don’t know if there is one reason to have a bowl game.”
The main reason is the same as it ever was. “The first thing we want them to be is a reward for the players,” said Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby, who also leads the NCAA’s football oversight committee.
The problem is that bowls also reward competence, not excellence.
Once the minimum for postseason eligibility was drawn at 6-6 when the regular season expanded to 12 games, pressure built on conference officials to place each eligible team in a bowl.
Coaches want the extra bowl practices to develop players and the ability to sell a bowl game to recruits.
“Mr. Commissioner, if my 6-6 team stays home I’m going to be your worst enemy,” Football Bowl Association Executive Director Wright Waters recalled hearing from one university president back when he was commissioner Sun Belt Conference.
The bowl lineup grew to 40 games as Power Five conferences locked up spots in most existing games and other conferences such as the American Athletic Conference, Sun Belt and Mountain West worked to create new games — often with the help of ESPN.
The result is that during the last two years 5-7 teams played in bowl games.
“Beginning in 2020 I seriously doubt there will be 40 bowl games,” said Sun Belt Commissioner Karl Benson, who has previously been the commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference and the Mid-American Conference.
But no conference is about to voluntarily shut down one of its bowls.
That’s where the oversight committee will come in. Bowlsby said the group has been analyzing data to determine how many bowl slots each conference can typically fill. When bowl lineups are reset for 2020 and beyond, conferences will likely be limited to a number that matches a five-year average of the eligible teams they have produced.
Attendance dropped 4.94 percent this season from last, according to data compiled by the Football Bowl Association. Average attendance went from 43,018 in 2015-16 to 40,893 this season.
“I think the industry is healthy,” said Pete Derzis, senior vice president for ESPN Events, which owns and operates 13 bowls, including the Gildan New Mexico Bowl.
Derzis called the TV ratings for this season’s bowls respectable. Waters said those final numbers were still being compiled.
The Las Vegas Bowl on Dec. 17, in which San Diego State beat Houston 34-10, drew 3.7 million TV viewers on ABC, ESPN’s parent network.
Reaching and winning a good bowl game is still a major goal for most programs.
“But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with ending your season with a victory,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said.