Dear college football,
Before I begin, you should know I’m a bowl guy at heart. As I write this sitting in my home office, I can turn to my left and see a framed print of the 1949 Rose Bowl game program. Behind me is a mammoth “History of the Bowls” coffee table book.
Also behind me is a stack of copies of a book explaining the College Football Playoff — a book I wrote. That’s right, I was so excited about the move from the BCS to the CFP in 2014 I decided to write a book about it. That no one actually read it is beside the point. Just wanted to establish my bona fides before I get to the next part.
I’m writing to tell you I’m now embarrassed by the same postseason I long embraced. You’ve got a real problem on your hands, folks, and you need to address it. Quickly. Don’t form a task force to review meeting notes of a committee assigned to review the postseason structure. Here’s the evaluation: BROKEN!
Do you know there is a 2-8 team playing in one of your bowl games this year? One so bad it already fired one coach and hired another? I know, it’s a pandemic, we’re loosening the rules a bit, but still … 2-8? And do you know who gets the honor of facing that 2-8 South Carolina team in the Gasparilla Bowl? Only one of the sport’s 10 conference champions, UAB. Nice reward, fellas. What’s in the gift bag, a screwdriver and some nails?
Also, do you know that Army finished 9-2 this year and will NOT get to go to a bowl game? You guys designed a system so patriotic it includes both the MILITARY and the ARMED FORCES bowls, but when teams started opting out and bowls started getting canceled, somehow the United States Military Academy got hung out to dry. I know, you’re bound to contracts. It’s always those pesky contracts. But when a 9-2 military academy gets left out and a bunch of 2-8 or 3-7 teams get in, you may want to write up some new contracts that don’t, you know, make a mockery of your entire enterprise.
But of course, you’ve got far more pressing issues on your hands than the fate of the Independence Bowl. You’ve got a pair of Playoff semifinal bowls coming up in less than two weeks. One of them doesn’t have a name yet, because you decided at 10:30 p.m. Saturday night you didn’t want to play it at the Rose Bowl this year. Nice work on that press release, by the way, citing the “growing number of COVID-19 cases in Southern California,” as if you haven’t been flying your student-athletes in and out of COVID hot spots for the past four months. Did “We can at least salvage some gate revenue if it’s in Dallas” get workshopped, or no?
Of more concern for football fans, the opening point spread on that game between No. 1 Alabama and No. 4 Notre Dame was 19.5 points. That would normally be a sign that your selection committee picked the wrong team, but in fact, based on the criteria you yourselves established, they followed it exactly right. It’s not your fault there simply aren’t four “elite” teams this season. Arguably there aren’t three, given one of your other semifinalists, Ohio State, has won all of six (6) games.
The problem as I see it is that you’ve inadvertently created a highly exclusionary event that with each passing year alienates another segment of the population. Which is not ideal when someone (ESPN) is paying you $7.3 BILLION dollars to air said event.
The first year in 2014 was GREAT. Alabama with Derrick Henry and Amari Cooper, Ohio State with Ezekiel Elliott and Joey Bosa, Florida State with Jameis Winston and Oregon with Marcus Mariota. Four captivating teams from four different regions of the country. The No. 4-seeded Buckeyes went on an improbable title run with their third-string quarterback. The first year the sport ever had a Playoff, and bam it delivered!
How could you have known what would happen shortly thereafter? That Alabama and Clemson would be one more win apiece from playing each other for the fifth time in six Playoffs. That every year of the thing so far would include either or both Ohio State and Oklahoma. That the Pac-12 would vanish so far from the picture that ESPN’s analysts did not even mention it for the first time until two-and-a-half hours into Sunday’s selection show. And those pesky little nuisances from the Group of 5 would keep producing genuinely good football teams like Cincinnati for the committee to summarily dismiss.
The cumulative effect of all this is as follows:
• Large segments of the viewing public — the entire West Coast, all the Big Ten fan bases outside of Ohio State, all of the Big 12 fan bases outside of Oklahoma, and every fan of a Group of 5 team — has increasingly little reason to be invested in the season-long Playoff race.
• Whereas in the past, many of those fan bases would still be excited to watch their team play in a bowl game, the combination of star players opting out, a selection process devoid of merit and now this year’s rash of teams blowing them off entirely (albeit for understandable reasons) has devalued the entire system.
• Which puts the entire focus of the sport on those three Playoff games. But unfortunately, the more casual college football-viewing audience has little interest in watching Alabama or Clemson streamroll Notre Dame again, or play each other for the umpteenth time. It’s no coincidence ESPN has never come close to matching the mammoth 30.2 million average viewers of that first year. (Last season’s were nearly 30 percent lower.)
The first and most obvious fix will be something I’ve long resisted: Expanding the Playoff, with automatic bids for conference champions. Unlike when you went from two teams to four, this will have almost nothing to do with actually determining the national champion. The teams with the best coaches and the best players — i.e. Alabama and Clemson — will still win the whole thing.
But so many more teams and fans will feel like they’re part of the main event. Pac-12 coaches and players will go into the season knowing they control their Playoff destiny. Provided you see it fit to include an automatic Group of 5 berth — which, if you don’t, I’m sure an antitrust court would be happy to include for you — Cincinnati will know that if it goes 9-0 and fields the No. 1 defense in the country, it won’t matter whether the committee refuses to drop a three-loss SEC team beneath it.
And fans will dig the opportunity to watch more compelling games in December and early January. Sure, there may be some semifinal blowouts, just like there have been to this point, but a Florida-Oklahoma quarterfinal will draw a lot more eyeballs than the coming Florida-Oklahoma Cotton Bowl in which both teams’ best NFL prospects will inevitably opt out. (Florida tight end Kyle Pitts has already.)
Again — it pains me to write that. I love bowl games. I love all the weird events around them. I love seeing David Shaw in a Sun Bowl sombrero and Chris Petersen posing with an Elvis impersonator at the Vegas Bowl. But I can also read a room. People just don’t care about these the way they once did.
And by the way, that includes the coaches. I’m sure it was quite jarring for the industry last week to hear Brian Kelly spend five minutes basically dumping all over the sport’s most prestigious bowl. Parents or no parents in the stands, the Rose Bowl has long been a Mecca for potential participants, but there was Kelly ranting about “worshipping the ashes of tradition.” (Rich, by the way, coming from a school whose entire identity is rooted in the ashes of tradition, but I digress.)
In our post-vaccine world, the Rose Bowl will return to Pasadena next year, and Army won’t have to worry about the Independence Bowl getting canceled, but don’t kid yourselves into thinking Bowl Season will go back to normal. The pandemic has exposed how unessential many of these games are to today’s coaches/players/fans.
The four-team CFP was always going to be a bridge between the old bowl system and the inevitable creep toward a full-fledged Playoff. It wasn’t supposed to happen until the end of the current contract in 2026. But folks, I’m telling you, you need to accelerate those plans.
Don’t subject the entire sport to another five years of increasing malaise and apathy. Don’t keep telling the Armys of the world they’re less important than the 13th-best SEC team.
Blow up the postseason as we know it and start a new one where more teams feel invested, more games matter, and December feels more like an acceptance celebration and less like a rejection letter.
It was 8 years ago this month that I dropped into IE just to see what fans of the other school thought about our upcoming NC game. I ended up staying and making friends over the years. 
