A couple weeks back, ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit made some headlines when he suggested that with the introduction of the twelve-team College Football Playoff format next season, the college football postseason as we know it should cease to exist. Here’s exactly what Herbstreit said (h/t Kristian Dyer of Yahoo Sports):
“Don’t play bowls. We’ll have the 12 teams, we’ll get excited about those and if you want to add maybe five or six more bowls outside of that, then do five or six. We’re getting to a point that is ridiculous. We’re putting 6-6 teams in bowl games nobody cares about.”
Now here’s the part where you’d expect me, the writer, to play the contrarian and talk about how what Kirk Herbstreit is saying is absolutely preposterous and that it would be a crime to throw all of this history away. Here’s the thing though… I’m not gonna bang my fists on the table and tell you that Herbstreit is completely wrong. Whether we all like it or not, this is a new era of college football that we’re living in. The way we watch the game is different, the way we consume the game is different, and the way the sport/business of college football operates altogether is different.
So that means that it’s time to tear this thing down and start almost entirely from scratch, even if we want to find a way to preserve the history and spirit of what made the College Football Bowl season so special in the first place.
For example, I love what the Duke's Mayo Bowl and Pop-Tarts Bowl were able to do this year, going viral for their fresh takes on old traditions, like a Mayonnaise bath instead of the traditional Gatorade bath, or introducing something new altogether, like allowing the winning team to eat a mascot at game's end. As long as those two products remain the sponsors of those respective bowl games for a long period of time, these are the sorts of new traditions that can remind us of the old ways. However, there's one big issue:
The Duke’s Mayo Bowl was previously the Belk Bowl. And before that, it was the Meineke Car Care Bowl. And before that, it was the Continental Tire Bowl. And before that, it was the Queen City Bowl. The inconsistency with the naming rights of the Pop-Tarts Bowl is even worse. Since 1990, the Pop-Tarts Bowl has gone by ten different names, which prevents there from being any sort of history that's associated with the bowl game itself. I understand why corporate sponsors are necessary, and we'll get to some ideas I have for corporate sponsors soon enough, but first, let's start this off with the main event… the College Football Playoff.
I: 8-team College Football Playoff
I know that we've yet to see one edition of the upcoming 12-team College Football Playoff, but I'm already prepared scrap the whole thing like it never existed and move forward with your more conventional 8-team playoff. It's pretty simple… With the dissolution of the Pac-12, we've got four major conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC) and five conferences still making up the Group of 5 (AAC, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Sun Belt). An 8-team College Football Playoff would look like this:
5 Automatic Bids – Conference Champions of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC, and the highest ranked Group of 5 Conference Champion
3 At-Large Bids – Highest ranked teams remaining
From there, the 8-team field would be set, and it would be up to the College Football Playoff Selection Committee to properly seed those eight teams. No priority would be given to Conference Champions, meaning the five conference champions in the field wouldn't necessarily occupy the top five seeds. The top four seeds would host opening round games at their home stadium, and from there, the remaining two rounds of the College Football Playoff would take place at the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, and the Sugar Bowl, where there would be a three-year rotation of which game hosted the National Championship.
For the 2024-25 college football season, this is what the schedule would look like:
Saturday Dec. 21st – College Football Playoff Quarterfinal – On Campus Games
4 pm Wednesday January 1st – College Football Playoff Semifinal – Rose Bowl (Pasadena, California)
8 pm Wednesday January 1st – College Football Playoff Semifinal – Orange Bowl (Miami Gardens, Florida)
8 pm Monday January 13th – College Football Playoff Final – Sugar Bowl (New Orleans, Louisiana)
Work for you? Yeah, works for me too.
Now let's get to the rest of the postseason.
II: Revamp the Bowl Game Schedule
At the moment, there are 41 different bowl games, and that doesn't even factor in the games that make up the College Football Playoff. If my calculations are correct, that's about twenty too many. Now I love football as much as the next guy, but let's just be honest for a second… we shouldn't have to pretend that we're excited to watch below .500 teams from the Sun Belt and MAC play each other in a stadium with 12,000 people. It doesn't make you any less of a football fan to admit that. Go ahead, take a second, and say out loud, I don't need to pretend to be excited to watch below .500 teams from the Sun Belt and MAC play each other in a stadium with 12,000 people.
Seriously, say it.
(Waiting)
(Still waiting)
Doesn't it feel good? Don't you feel like a burden's been lifted off your shoulders? Of course you do!
So let's revisit the College Football Playoff for a second. Over the course of three rounds, there will be seven Playoff games. I personally don't see any reason why there should be more than 25 games in the college football postseason, so that means moving forward for the remainder of time, we're rocking with 18 bowl games, all which are listed below, and once again, this is what the schedule would look like for the 2024-25 season.
Monday December 23rd – Fenway Bowl (Boston, Massachusetts) – Big Ten vs. SEC
Monday December 23rd – Pinstripe Bowl (Bronx, New York) – ACC vs. Big 12
Thursday December 26th – Cardinal Bowl (St. Louis, Missouri) – Sun Belt vs. Conference USA
Thursday December 26th – Wrigley Bowl (Chicago, Illinois) – Mountain West vs. American
Friday December 27th – Steel City Bowl (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) – American vs. MAC
Friday December 27th – Dodger Bowl (Los Angeles, California) – Mountain West vs. Sun Belt
Saturday December 28th – Music City Bowl (Nashville, Tennessee) – MAC vs. SEC
Saturday December 28th – Las Vegas Bowl (Paradise, Nevada) – Big Ten vs. ACC
Monday December 30th – Humanitarian Bowl (Boise, Idaho) – Mountain West vs. Big 12
Monday December 30th – Alamo Bowl (San Antonio, Texas) – Sun Belt vs. SEC
Tuesday December 31st – Holiday Bowl (San Diego, California) – Conference USA vs. Big Ten
Tuesday December 31st – Liberty Bowl (Memphis, Tennessee) – American vs. ACC
Wednesday January 1st – Sun Bowl (El Paso, Texas) – Big 12 vs. Big Ten
Wednesday January 1st – Gator Bowl (Jacksonville, Florida) – ACC vs. SEC
Wednesday January 1st – Citrus Bowl (Orlando, Florida) – SEC vs. Big Ten
Thursday January 2nd – Peach Bowl (Atlanta, Georgia) – Big Ten vs. ACC
Friday January 3rd – Cotton Bowl (Arlington, Texas) – SEC vs. Big 12
Saturday January 4th – Fiesta Bowl (Glendale, Arizona) – Big 12 vs. ACC
Now maybe you've noticed that there are a few new bowl games on the schedule … the Cardinal Bowl, the Wrigley Bowl, the Steel City Bowl, and the Dodger Bowl. I love the aesthetic feel of the Pinstripe Bowl and Fenway Bowl, and see no reason why a handful of other baseball stadiums shouldn't get in on the fun too. Football surpassed baseball as the most popular sport in America a long, long time ago, so it's only fair that baseball stadiums once again get to play host to “America's Game.”
Something else you may have noticed is that none of the above bowl games have a corporate sponsor attached to their name. Well, that's because as the self-appointed college football bowl game czar, we're changing up the relationship between bowl games and their sponsors.
III: Unique Game and Broadcast Experiences
Let's start here… each of our eighteen bowl games will have a corporate sponsor, but the corporate sponsor shouldn't be the bowl game itself. There needs to be a legacy if/when these sponsors change, but ideally, they'll be long-lasting. I hope that Duke's Mayo and Pop-Tarts never stop sponsoring bowl games, but history tells us they will. That means that moving forward, instead of the Duke's Mayo Bowl and the Pop-Tarts Bowl, we would have bowl games like “The Liberty Bowl, presented by Duke's Mayo” or “The Pop-Tarts Pinstripe Bowl.”
The way I see it, and as the college football bowl game czar, the way I would have it, there should be a ten-year contract agreed upon by the corporate sponsor and the organizers of each respective bowl game. And within that contract, there should be a plan for how each game is going to stand out amongst all the rest of the bowl games. Now I have some of the answers, but I'm also wise enough to know that I don't have all the answers. I don't know how to make all eighteen of our bowl games feel different, but I know that they all should feel different. A Mayonnaise bath and an edible Pop-Tart mascot are great jumping off points, but we don't need to stop there.
Each of the sponsors should have a pitch on what they'd bring to the table to make the viewing experience of the game stand out, and for what it's worth, this could be literally anything. If MTV wants to get in the bidding for a bowl game (the Music City Bowl would make the most sense), not only for the naming rights but to have the game broadcast on their channel, maybe instead of traditional commercial breaks, they play music videos during the stoppages in play. Imagine that, music videos on MTV!
Perhaps Franks RedHot wants to get in on the action, and instead of the traditional green turf field, we get some red turf put down inside of the Alamodome — I suggest this instead of a Franks RedHot bath because that seems like an unnecessarily dangerous post-game celebration that will surely land a head coach in the hospital. Or maybe GoPro secures themselves a bowl game, and they have an alternate broadcast where we're watching the game from the point of view of multiple players who have a GoPro camera built into their helmet.
Not bad, right?
Again, I don't have all of the answers, but I know we are in need of some new, fresh answers.
IV: Corporate Sponsor Cash Prizes
Since we're nearly 2,000 words deep into this thing, I'll keep this one short and sweet. The companies that acquire the rights to each of these bowl games have buttloads of money, right? That's how they acquire the rights to the game in the first place. But do you know who gets that money? The schools and the conferences that the schools play in. Additionally, most coaches get bonuses for making bowl appearances, so how about this very simple solution… why don't these multi-million dollar companies pony up some money for the players playing in the game? You know, the guys that audiences are tuning in to watch? You want to keep players from sitting out bowl games, how about you make it worth their while?
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