College football’s traditional bowl system is broken and in trouble. Deep trouble. And everyone knows it. The ever-increasing popularity of the expanded College Football Playoff national championship – along with winning programs declining bowl invitations – has seen to that.
But can the system be fixed, salvaged or reshaped to make it somehow relevant again in the wake of declining interest? Some say it’s already too late, that the end of the current system is inevitable and bowl games will soon become faded memories.
Scott Ramsey, president and CEO of the Nashville Sport Council and Liberty Mutual Music City Bowl, says the system is fixable and that the sport’s presidents, administrators and coaches will be hard at work in the coming offseason to find long-term solutions.
Furthermore, he anticipates the Music City Bowl being part of that future.
Ramsey points to Liberty Mutual recently signing on as title sponsor, the new enclosed stadium being built in downtown Nashville and a solid postseason resume as the reasons for his optimism. This year’s SEC/Big Ten matchup features Tennessee and Illinois, both 8-4, and is scheduled for Dec. 30, 4:30 p.m. CST, at Nissan Stadium. It will be the first meeting between the two schools.
“It’s exciting because we’re really at a big crossroads with postseason college football, seeing where the commissioners will make some decisions in January for how the future playoff is going to be structured, which will impact the overall postseason structure including bowls,” Ramsey says. “And to have a company like Liberty Mutual as our partner is going to give us a lot of options.
“I don’t know what those options are yet because we’re going to have to wait and see how the commissioners would like to structure a postseason, especially with the SEC, the Big Ten and ESPN as our partners. This year is the last year of our current contracts with all those entities, and we’ll see where that goes on a national scene for us to react to locally.
“We’re certainly bullish on postseason (options) with the new stadium coming in just two years. We think we’ve got all the ingredients to participate in a lot of different ways. We just don’t know what those opportunities are going to be yet. But we’re certainly going to be poised to hopefully be very aggressive and take advantage of – whether it’s a national championship game or any other opportunities.”
Great expectations in Music City
Both the Dec. 30 Music City Bowl and the New Year’s Eve ReliaQuest Bowl in Tampa – where No. 14 Vanderbilt (10-2) plays No. 23 Iowa (8-4) – are considered among this year’s top non-CFP bowl games. They are popular tourist destinations and feature teams with strong fan bases.
Last year’s Music City Bowl between Missouri and Iowa drew 43,375 to Nissan Stadium and, since its inception in 1998, the bowl has had a $450 million economic impact for Nashville and, by extension, Tennessee, city officials say. Davidson County accounts for more than 17% of the state’s sales annual tax collections – by far the most of any county – the Tennessee’s Office of Legislative Budget Analysis reports.
Another big boost for the city and state is expected again with what is basically another home game for the Volunteers.
“It’s our fourth time hosting Tennessee. We’ve had great attendance and sellout crowds the first three times we’ve had them – 2010, 2016 and 2021,” Ramsey says. “One of the goals for the bowl is to bring in people and fill up rooms in our city, and we think we’ll do that.
“We’ve seen the data from the Tennessee games in the past and even when we had Vanderbilt or Kentucky or an Auburn that has a big local base, the numbers bear out (that) probably 15,000-20,000 folks still stay in hotels. So that’s as good as a traveling team from farther away. And it certainly helps us with the environment for the players at the stadium when you add in the local folks who maybe just make a day trip of it.
“We expect pretty high economic impact with Tennessee and Illinois and look forward to a great game in the stadium for the players as well.”
Vanderbilt is expected to have a huge gathering in Tampa to root for the best team in school history, posting its first 10-win season and narrowly missing the CFP. School officials said Vandy sold out of its first ticket allotment, got more and sold out of those.
“We celebrate the fact that we have a great stage, a great bowl, a great opponent to finish this historic year off. And we’re going to be energized,” says fifth-year Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea, who has already won two national coaching awards this season and is one of five finalists for the 2025 Dodd Trophy, the winner to be announced during bowl week at the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl CFP semifinal in Atlanta.
Lower-tier bowls struggle
Many are pessimistic about the bowl system’s future – particularly after 10-2 Notre Dame, not selected to the 12-team CFP tournament, decided not to accept any bowl bids.
Nine other teams made the same decision, including Baylor, Kansas State and Iowa State, and 5-7 teams like Auburn and Florida State. Reasons given included coaching turnovers, players bolting to the transfer portal for bigger NIL paydays and players opting out to train for their hopeful NFL careers.
Brett McMurphy, the senior college football writer at On3 Sports, recently quoted a bowl executive as saying the current bowl system “is officially dead,” adding, “RIP. It was a nice run while it lasted.”
The first casualty of college football’s shifting landscape appears to be the LA Bowl, according to McMurphy, who tweeted its imminent demise before Washington hammered Boise State 38-10 on Dec. 13. The announced crowd of 23,269 for the final game of the current contract might have been closer to 15,000, it was reported. Three other early bowls also reported attendance in the 15,000 range, and 17,324 showed up for the 68 Ventures Bowl Dec. 17 in Mobile, Alabama.
Ramsey says CFP and college leaders will examine the entire bowl structure, a total of 47 postseason games, including 11 in the playoffs and 36 traditional bowl games.
“They’ve set an internal deadline (Jan. 23) to make some decisions on the playoff structure for next year. And then we will follow with them on what the bowl system will be,” Ramsey says. “So we’re expecting late January and February and hopefully having some meetings to kind of make some decisions there.
“As an overall industry, it’s something that we’ve really got to address and work through in how the whole system and the playoff system can complement each other,” Ramsey says. “It’s going to be a big decision, but it really rests with the conferences and the schools, what they really want out of the postseason.
“We’re hopeful that Nashville can stay at the forefront of that and we’re going to have to react with their decisions this spring.”
CFP talks and bowl structure
While the future of bowls will be a hot topic at the Jan. 13-16 NCAA Convention near Washington, D.C., there’s little that can be done until the College Football Playoff leaders decide on expansion and format.
The CFP, primarily led by the Southeastern Conference and Big Ten, is a consortium of FBS conferences and Notre Dame created in 2014, replacing the BCS National Championship with a four-team tournament. Last year, the field was expanded to 12 teams, and Ohio State defeating Notre Dame 34-23 in the finale.
A restructuring of the current 12-team format is at the root of calls for further expansion to 16 or more. The CFP selection committee includes Middle Tennessee State athletic director Chris Massaro.
The field includes the five highest-ranked conference champions plus the next seven highest-ranked schools. James Madison (Sun Belt) and Tulane (American) made the 12-team field as conference champions, while higher-ranked Notre Dame, Texas and Vanderbilt were omitted.
Lea points out the obvious flaw of the CFP, that the goal of having the nation’s 12 best – or 16 – teams on the field is largely unreachable with Cinderella-type teams like JMU and Tulane, schools that play less-difficult regular-season schedules.
“Look, the system is the system. So, to work toward a system that puts the 12 best – or 16 best, hopefully – teams in at the finish, I think is really important,” Lea says. “We’ve gone from the BCS championship to a four-team playoff to now a 12-team playoff.
“It’s like you hold on to certain aspects of what was before and you start to try to think about automatic bids, and how do we give room for those Cinderella stories that we all love so much. And yet, you look up and you say, ‘Hey, did we really do what we could to get 12 in?’
“And that’s not about the committee; that’s about the system. That’s how we designed the system. So I think we’d all agree that with where the game has gone, if there’s been a separation in the way the game is played.”
Warp speed changes
Ramsey agrees the game has evolved faster than the bowl structure and that fixes are needed. But he’s reluctant to declare the bowl system dead.
“I’m not ready to go that far yet. We’re seeing a lot of change, certainly,” Ramsey says, noting all the changes that have occurred in the sport since the Nashville Sports Council signed a six-year agreement with the SEC, the Big 10 and ESPN in 2019.
“In this six-year contract period, we’ve seen massive changes to college football overall. We had the COVID situation early in that contract period. Then we had shifting from when we signed the deals of a four-team playoff shifting to the 12-team playoff.
“We saw conference realignment, which really led to the demise of the Pac-12 conference, which bowls had tie-ins, too. We saw the explosion of the transfer portal and early decisions on coaching changes. So I think we’ve seen so many changes so rapidly.”
Lea doesn’t blame the selection committee for leaving Vandy out of the 12-team CFP field, saying the Commodores had their opportunities in losses at Alabama and Texas.
“The committee has a really challenging job, and I think there’s going to be a lot of great conversation – constructive conversation – in the offseason,” he says. “How do we shape this in a form that resembles the way the game’s evolved? We’re adapting systems as we move. That’s challenging.
“We happened to be on the wrong side of that in this moment but, look, that’s no one’s fault except our own. … As it is, we’ll spend time in the offseason trying to get the system more in focus with where the game is going. In the meantime, we’re going to celebrate the hell out of going and playing in Tampa and having some fun together one last time.”
Ramsey and Lea anticipate more changes to that structure in the coming months.
“It’ll be very important for how the conferences – made up of the schools and the commissioners – really foresee overall postseason football. We’ll see where they go. I mean, that decision lies with them,” Ramsey says.
“We’re certainly ready to continue to host an event that we think is important. I know we’re going to see a lot of players here playing their last college game. We’ll see a lot of fans (who) are going to enjoy our city. They’re going to come down for it, and we’re going to hopefully showcase Illinois and Tennessee through a national broadcast along with our city.
“So we think there’s a lot of positives there, but certainly we’re not blind to a lot of the changes that are happening at warp speed right now.”
Adds Lea: “It probably leaves a little less room for some of those Group of Five Cinderella stories. That is in no way disrespectful to the teams that’ll be in, James Madison and Tulane. They are well-coached and well-deserving of the opportunity. It just comes at the expense of teams that have actually played through a tougher schedule to get there.
“The automatic bid part of this is tricky to me. I think that’ll be where a lot of our conversations exist in the offseason – what is the right way to design this so that we can, year-in and year-out, ensure that the best 12 or 16 teams are in it.”
Solutions abound
Everyone seems to have an opinion on how to fix college football’s bowl structure, some practical and others not so much.
USA Today columnist Blake Toppmeyer recently suggested creating a four-team football version of the National Invitation Tournament, one which would have included Vanderbilt.
On “The Dan Patrick Show,” former UCLA star and coach Rick Neuheisel suggested moving bowl games from the end of the season to the start of the season.
Ramsey sees many problems with those notions in terms of broadcast rights, venue availability, current scheduling and just getting the conferences and schools to agree.
It might boil down to natural selection, leading to a super-conference where only the strongest non-CFP bowls survive.
“In our conference, we’ve now added a ninth conference game. Well, now you’ve added an additional loss to eight programs in our league,” Lea notes. “There has to be kind of an awareness of those challenges that we are selecting into and then also how we do the best we can to evolve the selection process into the playoffs to account for that. We believe that in this league every week feels like the playoffs.”