The Slow, Inevitable Death of the Bowl Game

It’s been a hard month for the once-prestigious college bowl. Just hours after Notre Dame learned that it would not be included in this season’s College Football Playoff—the mega-popular, multibillion-dollar, 12-team invitational that crowns an NCAA Division I champion—the team announced that it would not play in any bowl whatsoever this year. Nine other programs, including Florida State, Auburn, and Baylor, soon followed Notre Dame’s lead, declining bowl bids. Fans, pundits, and football insiders lashed out at these schools for refusing to finish out the season with one final game. Notre Dame took the brunt of the criticism; people called the team “quitters” and wondered if its choice sounded “a death knell” for the entire bowl tradition.

Here’s the reality: The bowls have been dying a slow death in terms of cultural importance since 1998, when the college-football power brokers instituted the first national-championship game open to teams from every major conference. The move to a four-team playoff in 2014 hastened the decline of the old bowl system, and last year’s expansion to a 12-team playoff put it on life support. With the best teams now competing in a proper playoff, the other postseason games have effectively become consolation prizes, late-season scrimmages with no stakes whatsoever.

It should have been obvious that this format would render the pageantry of the bowls irrelevant. The power brokers who created the national-title game back in 1998 worried as much: “In an effort to focus on a championship game,” the Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese said way back at the start, “we’re putting all the other bowls in a negative position.”

At the time, the bowls truly mattered. In the 1989–90 season, teams played just 18 bowl games. For many players, a bowl game was one of their only chances to appear on national television, and the exposure launched careers. The Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, and the Cotton Bowl dated back to the early 20th century and managed to transcend sports, becoming must-watch TV on New Year’s Day—the Rose Bowl perhaps most of all. Jim Delany, a former commissioner of the Big Ten, told me recently that the teams in his conference didn’t dream about winning national titles; they dreamed about going to Pasadena, California, to play in the Rose Bowl. “It was welcomed as a cultural event,” Delany said. “It had a great time slot on New Year’s Day—at 2 p.m. local, 5 p.m. eastern. The parade and the ratings were Super Bowl–esque in the ’50s and ’60s.”

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Even the lesser bowls—such as the Holiday Bowl, played for the first time in 1978 in San Diego—mattered. Ty Detmer, the quarterback at Brigham Young University from 1988 to 1991, threw for 576 yards against Penn State in the 1989 Holiday Bowl, which was broadcast on ESPN. The following season, Detmer won the Heisman Trophy, the most prestigious award in college football. In a lot of ways, Detmer told me, he could trace his Heisman win to his performance in that game against Penn State. “That put us on the map,” he said. “That was the culmination of our season, even though it wasn’t a national championship.”

But the tradition of the bowls was also slowing the growth of the game. In many seasons, the best teams in the country never crossed paths. They played in different conferences during the regular season and didn’t match up in the bowls. That left it up to pollsters to determine a national champion by a vote. Many years, they returned different results, leading to two champions; in the 1990s, fans were horrified when three seasons ended without a clear winner.

Fans demanded a new system—and one man had a solution. Roy Kramer, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, believed that he could preserve the sanctity of the bowls while giving people the national champion they wanted. Kramer pulled together a coalition of fellow commissioners, including Delany at the Big Ten. Together, they laid the groundwork for the Bowl Championship Series, a format that would include every major conference and create the first-ever national-title game that would name an indisputable college-football champion. Huddling in a small library at the SEC headquarters with a young public-relations man named Charles Bloom, Kramer set out to invent a mathematical formula that used data points, including a team’s overall record and the strength of its schedule, to determine which two teams should get the call to play in the title game.

Bloom, who is now an athletic director at the University of South Carolina, told me that Kramer was driven to get the formula right, demanding “relentless research.” When they thought they had one that worked, Kramer and Bloom checked it against the results of previous seasons to make sure that it successfully chose the best two teams. And when the system was unveiled, in 1998, Kramer had created a new—and more certain—world. Finally, the college-football season would end with a clear champion.

Almost immediately, the criticism came. “Today, people are arguing about the 12th and 13th teams,” Bloom said. “Well, back then you were arguing about the second and third teams.” Every year, teams felt snubbed. The arguments, at times, grew heated, and people began calling for a bigger playoff.

Kramer pushed back. He said that he could list “100 reasons” an expanded playoff would be bad for the sport—one being that it would make the bowls irrelevant. But by the early 2000s, Kramer was in his early 70s and nearing retirement. From the moment he left the SEC, in 2002, younger voices began rallying support for playoff expansion. After years of debate, a four-team playoff began in 2014.

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But with more spots in the playoff field, more teams could now make a credible case that they should have been included. Arguments became a staple of bowl season. Delany, who was still the commissioner of the Big Ten at the time, knew what was coming next: an even bigger playoff. “It was obvious that it was going to grow, and going to grow, and going to grow,” he said, “because no matter what you give, people want more.”

In general, most people would agree that the 12-team playoff, launched last year, has been good for college football. Teams competing this season will split nearly $120 million in winnings. ESPN inked a $7.8 billion deal to broadcast these games through the 2031–32 season, and if last year’s ratings are any indication, fans will be tuning in to watch: The title game in January drew a TV audience of more than 22 million viewers.

Before the second season with the new playoff format is even over, Kramer’s predictions are already coming true. The bowls do mean less, because the playoff is now everything. This postseason involves 11 playoff games, with high stakes and big crowds—as well as 35 other bowl games, played for the most part by mediocre teams with mediocre records, with very little fanfare at all. These games aren’t the Rose Bowl of yesteryear. They aren’t even the Holiday Bowl circa 1989. They’re the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl, the GameAbove Sports Bowl, the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl. And in the years to come, you can bet that more college programs will skip them. They won’t want bowls; they’ll want the playoffs, which the college-football power brokers are already considering expanding—to 16 teams, or maybe 24.

It’s the future that Roy Kramer feared. At least he won’t be around to see it. He died at the age of 96 early this month, just a few days before Notre Dame got snubbed, took its football, and went home.

Illustration Sources: Louis Grasse / Getty; Bruce Yeung / Getty; Ric Tapia / Icon Sportswire / Getty; Robin Alam / Icon Sportswire / Getty; John Cordes / Icon Sportswire / Getty; Andrew Dieb / Icon Sportswire / Getty; Scott Donaldson / Icon Sportswire / Getty; Jonathan Daniel / Getty.