An expected casualty of the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff was the ever-expanding slate of non-playoff bowl games. Apparently, rumors of their demise have been greatly exaggerated.
According to a report by Stewart Mandel in The Athletic, 21 of the 30 non-playoff bowl games this season experienced year-over-year viewership increases.
“It’s a repudiation of the longstanding concern that a bigger Playoff would diminish interest in the other bowls,” Mandel writes. “If anything, the addition of first-round CFP games the weekend of Dec. 20 and 21 likely boosted viewership for the games played over the 10 days between those and the quarterfinal round by keeping college football in the conversation longer.”
That very well may be the case. In fact, several bowl games this season have set records that are more than a decade old, an incredible feat during this era of diminished television viewing.
The Pop-Tarts Bowl set a 16-year old record. The Pinstripe Bowl an 11-year record. The Birmingham Bowl a 10-year record. The list goes on.
Bowl games, even between teams with mediocre records, some of which have already been ravaged by transfer portal opt-outs, consistently draw audiences larger than any other programming ESPN airs during the month of December (and early January).
The Alamo Bowl drew 8 million viewers, more than the SMU-Penn State playoff game on TNT (6.6 million viewers). The Pop-Tarts Bowl did the same, drawing 6.8 million viewers on ESPN. The ReliaQuest Bowl between Michigan and Alabama drew 6.5 million viewers.
If college football is on, Americans will watch.
Mandel points out that the TV future for “Bowl Season” (the collection of non-CFP bowls) is uncertain in the near future. ESPN’s contract with the bowl games (of which it owns all but two) expires next season, in 2025. That leaves the door open for a sea change in how these non-playoff games are viewed.
In any case, the theory that an expanded playoff would hurt the other bowls doesn’t seem to hold much water after this year’s numbers.
