It’s plain and simple: Football teams shouldn’t be rewarded for a losing season.
Yet that is exactly what is going to happen if the NCAA doesn’t start reining in the number of postseason games.
A bowl game should be a reward for a team that excels, not a consolation prize for effort. In 1996, there were only 18 bowl games. As of now, a total of 35 games have been licensed for next year. That means that 70 of the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision teams, aka Division 1, will make it to postseason play.
Last season there were eight 6-6 teams who played in bowl games. In the past three seasons, 72 of the 120 teams have finished .500 or better. But with only a margin of error of 2, it is not improbable that a team with a 5-7 record might make the cut.
In fact, it has already happened. The 2001 New Orleans Bowl featured the 6-5 Colorado State Rams playing the 5-6 North Texas Mean Green. Even with a losing record, North Texas was the Sun Belt Conference Champion and therefore given an automatic bid to a bowl game.
“I’m not one of those guys that’s like, well, that’s too many bowls,” said Tony Barnhart, college football analyst for CBS Sports. “But everything can have its excess, and to me, I think that’s kind of where we need to draw the line is having 5-7 teams playing in the bowl games.”
The Rose Bowl will also be the “granddaddy of them all,” and being invited to any of the other BCS games, such as the Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Fiesta Bowl or the National Championship Game, will always be an honor. But when close to 60 percent of teams make it to the postseason, an invitation to a second or third-tier game like the Macco Las Vegas Bowl that the Beavers played in last year starts to seem a bit anticlimactic.
In 1996, with only 36 teams making it to the postseason, I can guarantee you it was more exciting to make it to a bowl. These days, if you have a halfway decent team, it is expected. These days, a team doesn’t even have to break top-50 rankings.
And it is only going to get worse. It isn’t as if the NCAA is suddenly going to stop licensing bowl games from this day forward. At some point, there will be a threshold where adding more games will no longer be profitable, but by squeezing out each and every possible dollar, they have cheapened the experience of playing in a bowl.
According to the NCAA, last season’s bowl games generated more than $237 million and garnered nearly 1.59 million fans.
I get it; money is important. There are a lot of teams who have come to depend on the end-of-the-year bonuses that bowl games pay out. Last year, the Ducks made $17 million by just showing up in Pasadena on New Year’s Day. Even for going to a non-BCS bowl, Macco wrote a check to Oregon State for a cool million.
A million dollars doesn’t go quite as far as it used to, but money earned from bowl games is what makes sports like rowing and gymnastics at state schools possible.
At the end of the day, the decision to add bowl games year after year is a monetary one. Bowls make money for the game sponsor, they make money for the network and they make money for the teams who play in them.
Would it be a bigger deal to make it to a bowl game if the NCAA returned to a postseason schedule with only 18 games? Yes. Would people be really upset about it? Undoubtedly yes.
I am not advocating that long-standing bowl games be done away with, but rather that the powers acknowledge the dangerous territory they are now entering.
The idea that bigger is better is not unique to college football; the NCAA recently expanded basketball’s March Madness from 6e teams to 68. The silver lining in this cloud is that although the increase was done for monetary reasons, the NCAA was pragmatic enough to realize that the original plan to increase the field to 96 teams would do little more than water down one of college’s biggest sporting events.
This is only the second time March Madness has expanded since changing to the 64-team format in 1986.
Luckily, the NCAA was able to realize that not everyone is good enough to make it to The Dance, and hopefully, they will have enough foresight to see that in football, not everyone is good enough to go bowling.
Adding more bowl games year after year also brings up the debate about whether or not a postseason with bowl games is even a good idea. Many argue that the best way to end the season is with a playoff system similar to March Madness.
Football is currently the only NCAA Division 1 sport that ends with individual games rather than a championship tournament.
Changing to a playoff system would allow for a less-disputed National Champion, but is it realistic to assume that players would be able to stay healthy that long? Unfortunately, there is really no clear-cut answer to solve the current issues facing college football.
Bowl games generate much-needed revenue for university athletic departments, but with all things in life, there is a time when enough is enough, and allowing too many bowl games has the potential to sour the sport.
For now, the NCAA might be able to slide by and cross their fingers that next year is a good year for football and that no 5-7 teams make it to a bowl. But if the trend of adding bowls each year continues, no amount of finger-crossing (or even toe-crossing, for that matter) is going to keep teams with losing records out of the postseason.
As much as football fans love bowl season, no one is going to want to see a game where the winner just happens to be the slightly less terrible team.
“All of that is taking the pure game of college football in a direction that scares me,” said former Notre Dame offensive tackle Aaron Taylor. “Do I understand it? Yes. Do I like it? No.”