JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Greg McGarity had reason to be concerned. The Gator Bowl president kept a watchful eye on College Football Playoff scenarios all season and understood the fallout might affect his postseason matchup in Jacksonville.
What if the Southeastern Conference got five teams into the expanded CFP? What if the Atlantic Coast Conference landed three spots? It was a math problem that was impossible to truly answer, even into late November.
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Four first-round playoff games, which will end with four good teams going home without a bowl game, had the potential to shake up the system. The good news for McGarity and other bowl organizers: Adding quality teams to power leagues — Oregon to the Big Ten, Texas to the SEC and SMU to the ACC — managed to ease much of the handwringing.
McGarity and the Gator Bowl ended up with their highest-ranked team, No. 16 Ole Miss, in nearly two decades.
“It really didn’t lessen our pool much at all,” McGarity said. “The SEC bowl pool strengthened with the addition of Texas and Oklahoma. You knew they were going to push traditional SEC teams up or down. Texas ended up pushing just about everyone down.”
The long waiting game was the latest twist for non-CFP bowls that have become adept at dealing with change. Efforts to match the top teams came and went in the 1990s and first decade of this century before the CFP became the first actual tournament in major college football. It was a four-team invitational — until this year, when the 12-team expanded format meant that four quality teams would not be in the mix for bowl games after they lose next week in the first round.
“There’s been a lot of things that we’ve kind of had to roll with," said Scott Ramsey, president of the Music City Bowl in Nashville, Tennessee. “I don’t think the extra games changed our selection model to much degree. We used to look at the New York’s Six before this, and that was 12 teams out of the bowl mix. The 12-team playoff is pretty much the same.”
Ramsey ended up with No. 23 Missouri against Iowa in his Dec. 30 bowl. A lot of so-called lesser bowl games do have high-profile teams — the ReliaQuest Bowl has No. 11 Alabama vs. Michigan (a rematch of last year’s CFP semifinal), Texas A&M and USC will play in the Las Vegas Bowl while No. 14 South Carolina and No. 15 Miami, two CFP bubble teams, ended up in separate bowls in Orlando.
“The stress of it is just the fact that the CFP takes that opening weekend," Las Vegas Bowl executive director John Saccenti said. “It kind of condenses the calendar a little bit.”
Bowl season opens Saturday with the Cricket Celebration Bowl. The first round of the CFP runs Dec. 20-21. It remains to be seen whether non-CFP bowls will see an impact from the new dynamic.
They will know more by 2026, with a planned bowl reset looming. It could include CFP expansion from 12 to 14 teams and significant tweaks to the bowl system. More on-campus matchups? More diversity among cities selected to host semifinal and championship games? And would there be a trickle-down effect for everyone else?
Demand for non-playoff bowls remains high, according to ESPN, despite increased focus on the expanded CFP and more players choosing to skip season finales to either enter the NCAA transfer portal or begin preparations for the NFL draft.
“There’s a natural appetite around the holidays for football and bowl games,” Kurt Dargis, ESPN’s senior director of programming and acquisitions, said at Sports Business Journal’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum last week in Las Vegas. “People still want to watch bowl games, regardless of what’s going on with the playoff. ... It’s obviously an unknown now with the expanded playoff, but we really feel like it’s going to continue.”
The current bowl format runs through 2025. What lies ahead is anyone’s guess. Could sponsors start paying athletes to play in bowl games? Could schools include hefty name, image and likeness incentives for players participating in bowls?
Would conferences be willing to dump bowl tie-ins to provide a wider range of potential matchups? Are bowls ready to lean into more edginess like Pop-Tarts has done with its edible mascot?
The path forward will be determined primarily by revenue, title sponsors, TV demand and ticket sales.
“The one thing I have learned is we’re going to serve our partners,” Saccenti said. “We’re going to be a part of the system that’s there, and we’re going to try to remain flexible and make sure that we’re adjusting to what’s going on in the world of postseason college football.”
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