The Bowls aren’t going away

[u/Inside-Drink-1311]

Despite some saying that this could be the end of the bowls or that they could move to the beginning of the season, I do not think that will be the case. Some of the bowls make too much money to go away. Like do you really think the Citrus Bowl, Alamo Bowl, Sun Bowl etc are going to go away? There’s no way that happens. Yeah, it will likely be against worse competition and players will still opt out but there are a lot of people who still care about the bowls and the majority of the G6 still cares about them. I think we will see some shut down, especially since 24 teams in the playoffs means 12 less teams participating in a bowl. I heard someone suggest that the first round losers in the CFP still play in a bowl but that will never work as the teams will not want to play.

Moving bowls to the start of the season is not going to work either. Maybe we will get some more neutral site kickoff games so I guess they are bowl games in that sense. The problem though is that the team who will play in this bowl is not the team who actually earned it. Yeah, there’s not a lot of loyalty in CFB these days but I’m sure there’s still some seniors who would want to play. Also, do we really want to play most of these bowls in the hot weather. You may have to do some more northern bowls if that’s the case. Not sure if anyone would want to play in the Sun Bowl in August.

I do think it is possible that they just throw bowl eligibility out of the window and the bowls just choose whoever they want. That, I can see happening. The bowls are already dead (as we know it) and have been for years. This will make it worse but the games will still happen.

[u/cyberchaox]

I agree that the bowls won't go away...which is why now more than ever I feel we should abolish the subdivision system entirely. The "bowl" subdivision is literally planning to make a championship bracket the same size as the one the "championship" subdivision has. Meanwhile, the bottom-tier bowls already pretty much always need a few teams with losing records to fill out the slate.

32 teams, competing for the NCAA Division I National Championship. Same number of rounds as now, just without the byes. Autobids for every conference. And the whole thing is run by the NCAA, not by ESPN and the bowls. The bowl sites can host playoff games, because postseason tournaments frequently are played at neutral locations, but the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Cotton Bowl, are not going to be playoff games. They're going to go back to being the exhibition games they used to be.

But wait, how does that fix the problem of too many bad teams in bowls, when it's going to throw six more bowls into the ring of contending with non-playoff teams? Because the subdivisions merged, and because the P4 are going to be sucking up all the at-large bids most years and at least most of them every year. So all those teams that were getting at-large bids to the FCS playoffs--and all of the 6-6, 7-5, and in some of the weaker conferences 8-4 teams that weren't even making the playoffs in the FCS--those are all potential bowl teams now. In fact, while the bigger conferences are going to have more bowl tie-ins (which the P4, at least, will usually fail to fill all of anyway since they have so many playoff teams, giving the weaker conferences a shot at the back end of their slate anyway), we're going to make sure that every conference has at least one tie-in. If you're the top team in your conference that didn't make the playoffs, even if that conference is something weak like the OVC-Big South, you're going to a bowl.

[u/hawksnest_prez → u/cyberchaox]

Auto bids make zero sense in college football.

[u/Dry-Membership3867 → u/cyberchaox]

I agree we need to eliminate the subdivision part. That would help big time here. Also make it top 2 from each conference makes it into the playoffs and only the semis are bowl games.