College football bowl thread: Days of Signs and Roses

https://awfulannouncing.com/college-football/kirk-herbstreit-bowl-games-future-expanded-playoff.html

Interesting to talk about eliminating bowl games, from an announcer of a network that owns most of them. I think the portal is the bigger culprit in players not playing - only so many players are heading to the draft and actually have more to lose than gain by appearing. That said - if a dozen of the lesser bowls survive, I hope it is those that have local support like the Sun, Liberty, Independence, Vegas, Holiday, Alamo, Gator, Citrus and whatever the Tampa Bowl was at one time.

 

The bowl games will have to come up with some kind of supplemental NIL package to get people to play. Yes, we're arriving at full blown professionalism. Get used to it.

The more financially marginal bowls will probably go tits up. So be it.

As I posted several dozen pages ago, I think fairly soon we'll arrive at a model which holds back a fairly decent balloon payment to the end of the season, contingent on the player remaining available to play.

 

It's funny - i seem to remember hearing about players not making grades or screwing up which caused them not to play - so much better to just say you are "hitting the portal" and save you embarasment. -

 

Last one was the Hall of Fame Bowl. Marched in it one season before the beginning of the sponsor carousel.

(Yeah, yeah ... get off my lawn ... yeah, yeah ... )

 

My belief is that for the first two years of the 12-team the first round will be at the higher-seed sites, then the next tier of bowls behind the NY6 will demand some sort of rotation for those games. So those first-round games will have designated homes in the Citrus Bowl, Holiday Bowl, Tony the Tiger Bowl, etc on a rotation or every other year or every third year.

And when this expands to 16, which we know it will, that will leave you with 15 sites to play the games.

 

Thanks.

 

Hall of Fame Bowl - hell I remember watching that on Mizzlou from Alabama!

 

Hall of Fame Bowl started in Birmingham before moving to Tampa. The only other migrating bowls I remember off the top of my head are the Pop Tart (originally the Blockbuster Bowl at Joe Robbie) and the Liberty (Philly > Atlantic City > Memphis).

 

Most fans will not have the means to travel to three games in a playoff.

 

The limit doesn't even matter anymore now that the big NIL deals can easily pay for a semester

 

I would be interested to see if there is an uptick on bowls if there were fewer of them with better match-ups. After the playoff games, what if there were only 10 other games with essentially the rest of the top 25 and a couple of cherry-picked contests with big game opponents where conference tie-ins didn't apply -- you could have the best possible/watchable games.

 

There have been a few one-offs over the years.
The Bahamas/Famous Toastery Bowl was played in Charlotte this year because of stadium renovations in Nassau, but it's only supposed to be a one-year thing.
The 2005-06 Sugar Bowl was played in Atlanta because of Katrina, but it obviously returned to New Orleans.
The 1941-42 Rose Bowl was famously played in North Carolina following Pearl Harbor.