Devastated by its College Football Playoff snub, 11th-ranked Notre Dame chose to bow out of playing a bowl game entirely, thus branding the Irish sore losers.
But Notre Dame’s decision had far deeper-reaching consequences than a day of social media mockery. Administrators across college football all had the same reaction: What an absolute gut-punch to the already murky future of the fragile bowl system.
Notre Dame said the quiet part out loud: It’s Playoff or bust now for the nation’s premier programs. To which many of you might say, “Duh.”
But bowl games have been around for 123 years, and they’ve remained pretty darn resilient despite their decreasing relevance over the past dozen years. TV ratings were actually up for 21 of ESPN’s 30 pre-Playoff bowls in 2024, despite the now-customary rash of star players opting out of them, and as the CFP tripled in size.
The 2025 bowl season, on the other hand, may go down as a turning-point setback, much like when Stanford star Christian McCaffrey opted out of the Sun Bowl in 2016, spawning a trend that soon went from controversial to expected.
In addition to Notre Dame, two Big 12 schools in the midst of coaching changes, Iowa State and Kansas State, removed themselves from consideration, prompting $500,000 fines from their conference. Together, the three schools’ opt-outs left organizers short of enough six-win teams to fill 41 bowls, which opened the door for 5-7 squads.
While that’s not unusual, this was: More than a half-dozen of those teams, from Florida State to Rutgers, said “no thanks” to the last available bid in the ESPN-owned Birmingham Bowl, according to On3’s Brett McMurphy. Finally, nearly 10 hours after the CFP field was first revealed Sunday, organizers announced that the game would pit Sun Belt rivals Georgia Southern and Appalachian State, which faced each other on Nov. 6.
All in all, not a fun year to be one of the guys in those ugly blazers.
Had No. 11 Notre Dame not folded up shop for the season, it probably would have faced No. 12 BYU in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, an ACC-affiliated game in Orlando that became a social-media phenomenon the past two years with its irreverent marketing stunts. Nearly 7 million people watched last year’s Iowa State-Miami edition, a modern model by which the bowl business could build attention for its games.
But 105 shocked Notre Dame players who woke up Sunday thinking they’d be competing for a national championship probably weren’t dreaming of eating an edible mascot in front of a half-empty stadium. Many of the Irish’s NFL-bound upperclassmen, like star running back Jeremiyah Love, probably would not have played.
Florida State’s snubbed 13-0 team in 2023 inadvertently became a cautionary tale for this exact scenario, losing 63-3 in the Orange Bowl when it had to face Georgia with its J.V. team. And in today’s day and age, it’s hard to get players excited about $500 worth of bowl gifts when many of them are making much more in NIL deals.
Unlike most of his peers, Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, a former NBC executive, hasn’t spent decades getting wined and dined by bowl execs at junkets like the Fiesta Frolic. He might not particularly care that his school just set a precedent for future disappointed Playoff contenders that, if their numbers grow, could lead to a number of decades-old bowls eventually closing up shop.
Many are already living precariously, like the Holiday Bowl, a nearly 50-year-old San Diego institution, which reported $1.4 million in negative net assets on its 2024 tax return. The tourism association that runs the bowl explored moving its 2025 game to Saudi Arabia. Or the ReliaQuest (formerly Outback) Bowl, whose operator, the Tampa Bay Bowl Association, ran a combined deficit of $1.6 million in 2023 and 2024. The bowl used to regularly fill 60,000-plus seats at Raymond James Stadium but drew in the 30,000s in those two seasons.
The majority are still doing quite well, but all of their futures are currently hanging in limbo. All 35 non-CFP bowls’ contracts with their conference partners are up after this season, but they’ve been unable to sign new ones because the commissioners still haven’t agreed whether to expand the Playoff field from 12 to 16.
And of course, if and when the CFP gets bigger, the other bowls will become even more marginalized. If the No. 11 team is too distraught to play in the Pop-Tarts Bowl today, good luck convincing teams 17-20 to fill the Citrus Bowl in 2029.
Perhaps this was all inevitable, but that doesn’t make it less sad. In a sport built on quirky traditions that carry on over generations, bowl games were college football’s most celebrated quirk of all. Because there was no official national championship game for the first 129 seasons, getting tapped to play in any bowl, even the Copper Bowl or the Bluebonnet Bowl, was the greatest honor a player could enjoy.
The mystique began fading a bit with the dawn of the BCS in 1998, but even then, the national title game itself was considered a bowl game. The 2007 Oklahoma-Boise State Fiesta Bowl remains one of the most memorable bowl games in history despite having zero national championship ramifications.
Prestige began trending downward in the early 2010s, then accelerated once the Playoff began in 2014. The 12-team CFP was designed in part to restore interest in the New Year’s six games, which now host quarterfinals and semifinals, but fans began clamoring to move those games to campuses right from Year 1.
The bowls aren’t NIT-level irrelevant yet, given how many people actually watch them. They’re fun, they’re synonymous with the holiday season, and you may even get to see a coach get a vat of mayonnaise dumped on his head.
But you can’t have a bowl game without two teams that actually want to play in it.
Perhaps Notre Dame will prove to be a one-off. Or perhaps the Irish just pulled the team-level equivalent of McCaffrey’s trendsetting move nearly a decade ago.
The bowls survived player opt-outs. They will not survive a lack of interested schools.