It’s inevitable that the college football bowl system will die

You can blame it on the ever-expanding College Football Playoff, which has become the do-or-die goal for many programs.

You can blame it on the college football calendar, which causes the coaching carousel to spin faster and sooner every year.

You can blame it on NIL and the transfer portal, which leave schools scrambling to fill postseason rosters.

You can blame it on Lane Kiffin, cause what’s one more thing to add to the pile?

Whatever you want to blame it on, we’ve been on a road to the college football bowl system’s demise for some time now, and by all accounts, we are in the endgame.

After getting snubbed by the CFP committee on Sunday, Notre Dame announced that it would withdraw its name from consideration for a bowl game.

That comes on the heels of Kansas State and Iowa State both announcing they would not play in bowl games, as the former’s head coach retired during the week and the latter’s head coach just left for Penn State.

The situations are different across all three schools, but the ease with which they all decided not to compete in a bowl game sends a fairly strong message about how they have lost the importance they once had. Some even feel as though this is the canary in the coalmine for the beginning of the end.

“The bowl system we know now is officially dead,” Brett McMurphy shared on X. “RIP. It was a nice run while it lasted.”

“The No. 11 team in the country opting out of a bowl game says the quiet part out loud: The big programs are CFP or bust now,” wrote The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel. “Highly damaging precedent for a bowl system already clinging to hang on to relevance.”

Had they decided to play, Notre Dame would have been in the ACC’s non-CFP bowl tier that included the Pop-Tarts Bowl, Holiday Bowl, and Gator Bowl, all of which would have killed to have them. Those bowl games will have to “settle” for Georgia Tech, Virginia, and SMU.

It also stands to reason that Notre Dame may decide that its days of playing non-CFP bowl games are officially over. The juice is no longer worth the squeeze.

Those bowl games will still put up decent ratings. Football always does. And that’ll be a small comfort to ESPN, which owns and operates 17 bowl games and has the broadcasting rights to many others. The Worldwide Leader is undoubtedly looking at the writing on the wall and wondering how much longer that investment will pay off.

It may not matter, as they also have the lucrative broadcasting rights to the CFP, so sacrificing the bowl system is ultimately a disappointing but acceptable loss. They surely wanted the best of both worlds, but they’re part of the machine that has turned the CFP into college football’s be-all-end-all, so they don’t really have anyone to blame but themselves.

Some bowl games, like the Pop-Tarts Bowl and Duke’s Mayo Bowl, have realized they exist to be spectacles and should act accordingly. The football isn’t the point anymore. Other bowl games still trade on the notion that tradition will carry them through, and that’s a fool’s notion.

College football is such an odd sport, and always has been. If you were starting from scratch today, you would never consider the bowl system in a million years. But it made sense when CFB was regional and lacked the financial incentives to play deep into January. Those days are gone, and it doesn’t really make sense given how things are structured now (and in the near future). The playoff will expand. The conferences will evolve. The bowl game will lose all value to those in power.

Still, it will be sad all the same when the last bowl game turns out the lights. This sport has sacrificed so much tradition for the sake of money, sometimes for its betterment, but usually not. This is just one more inevitable loss along the way.