Change College Football Needs; Restoration of Rivalries, Elimination of Bowl Games
By: Marky Billson
Tags: College Football, Football, NCAA Football, Rivalry Games, Bowl Games

When an exhibition game is cancelled because a 2–8 team can’t attend, or it takes a virus for a 9–2 team to get an invite instead of one with a 3–7 record, they are obsolete. That’s happening now. Here’s a better alternative for all involved.

Marky Billson

College football bowl games haven’t just become obsolete. With so many losing, let alone less-than-outstanding, teams in them they’ve become comical.

They are postseason consolation games, nothing more, nothing less. They are kept alive by networks’ demands to have sports programming around the holidays, when we realize the NBA and NHL are cult sports, the NFL plays on weekends, and regular season non-conference college basketball is practically meaningless.

Bowl games were originally a reward. The Rose Bowl pitted the best team in the east against the best in the west, and offered sunshine in the winter during Christmas break and a glamorous trip to southern California for the participants. The winner would be looked at as the best team in the land!

Shot from an early Rose Bowl parade.

But that went out with the single-wing offense and the Dunkel Index. Today bowl games promote a mentality of mediocrity, where 6–6 (or worse) is worthy of the postseason.

We’re told bowl games are important for the participants because of the extra practice time. Poppycock. If a team doesn’t have it by December, they aren’t going to get it, and frankly then they wouldn’t be good enough for a bowl bid to begin with.

If you’re looking ahead to next year, it is better for the returning players to have time off to study for finals and heal than it is to go through a football practice. That’s why 15 teams, including undefeated Coastal Carolina and Big Ten West champion Northwestern, who are slated to participate in bowl games this year did not last season.

So with the fundamentals down pat, coaches usually use the time to install trick plays, which is why one sees so many of them in bowl games.

Tell us how, again, a practice in 2020 helps in 2021?

Especially when a quarter of the team in 2021 hasn’t arrived yet.

But there’s that thing about how the conferences take in the bowl payout money. The programming for ESPN. Keeping the interest factor of 5–6 teams alive late in the season.

So here’s an idea. Instead of bowl games, why not schedule games fans really care about and revive, or create, rivalries based on tradition and geography, destroyed by conference realignment in recent times?

Before bowl games became participation trophies, who won or was going to win the season finale against the in-state rival was all the rage around the Thanksgiving table. Even a losing season by Home Team U could be salvaged if victory was achieved against the hated team from nearby, and bragging rights in the schoolyard or office were secured for the next year.

Pitt v. Penn State. Texas v. Texas A & M. Louisiana State v. Tulane. Florida v. Miami. Boston College v. Holy Cross. All rivalries that once defined the schools that played in them. Now on hiatus.

Maybe national championships won’t be on the line if Pitt and Penn State play again. Or maybe, the reason the teams don’t contend for such riches anymore is they no longer play annually.

Or how about Clemson v. Georgia? Kansas v. Missouri. Virginia Tech v. West Virginia, Maryland v. Virginia, Nebraska v. Oklahoma. Tennessee v. Georgia Tech. Arkansas v. their old Southwest Conference foes, and countless other rivalries fans legitimately care about that have been eliminated by conference greed could be played in a home-and-home or neutral site basis instead of bowl games, creating a more profitable and popular alternative.

No game can expect to have this much hype every year. But a geographic rivalry like Clemson-Georgia doesn’t have to pit the national champs of the past two seasons to be interesting.

And even if you’re, say, Kentucky, which has wisely revived their once-dormant in-state rivalry with Louisville, why not create a new rivalry?

Why not Indiana, coupled with a basketball game?

Imagine the feel of the Wildcats and Hoosiers playing football at one campus in the afternoon and basketball in the evening at the other!

Imagine if all of the schools listed above did that!

Doesn’t that sound better than going to Detroit the day after Christmas?

Hard to tell if this is a pandemic or the Quick Lane Bowl. That’s the one in Detroit. MAC vs. ACC.

Practically every school has a geographical rival they don’t play anymore or they should start playing.

The only people watching bowl games are the fans of the teams involved. But what’s going to draw a bigger crowd of fans, a game against the arch-rival played on campus or a game played hundreds of miles away against a mediocre opponent from another region?

And why are colleges trying to support the coffers of merchants in Orlando or Charlotte when they could be doing the same in their own community?

Show some independence from conference masterhood. Instead of sharing revenue with a dozen or so teams, keep it between you and your opponent. If conference by laws prohibit this, show some solidarity and change the by laws!

Play the when the bowl games currently are scheduled. Negotiate your own television contracts, be it network, cable, or regional syndication. Sell naming rights to a local company. And give the fans a game they’d care about!

Heck, give PLAYERS a game they would care about! Think a pro-bound Aggie or Panther is going to sit out the chance to beat a Longhorn or Nittany Lion?

There’s no way of knowing for sure, but considering most players with an eye on the NFL Draft only leave their teams for bowl games and this arrangement eliminates the exhibition mindset college football postseason currently for a “biggest game of the year” type feel, it would seem less likely.

If a team was slated to be in the postseason, alternative opponents could be found. Say, Clemson (or, for that matter, Holy Cross) is in the playoffs and Georgia (or Boston College) isn’t. Georgia State (or UMass) would jump at the chance to take their place, establish their identity, and get a slice of such revenue.

Bowl games would become extinct, but who cares? Even the New Year’s Six is nothing but college football’s version of the National Invitational Tournament, which itself needs to go away.

Calling №69 a champion is not what competition is supposed to be about.

Besides, who won the NIT the last year?

I’ll save you the trouble. It was Texas.

And there isn’t a single Longhorns fan who wouldn’t trade that meaningless title, or this season’s Alamo Bowl bid against Colorado, for the chance to beat A & M on the gridiron one more time.

No, Wynn Everett. This just means more!

Follow Marky Billson on medium and subscribe to his You Tube channel!