The NCAA has halted the addition of new college football bowl games for three years, ESPN reported today.
That means there will be 41 FBS bowl games for the next three postseasons, including the College Football Playoff National Championship. There were almost 44 bowl games, as Austin, Texas, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina were all seeking to add bowls.
The AutoNation Cure Bowl and the NOVA Home Loans Arizona Bowl were added to the mix in 2015. Due to a lack of bowl-eligible teams, the Arizona Bowl was stuck with two Mountain West teams facing off.
In addition, organizers from Little Rock, Arkansas were also attempting to add a bowl game in recent years that would have matched up teams from the American and Sun Belt.
Last bowl season, 80 teams played in the postseason and three teams with losing records earned bowl berths. That number could have grown higher this season with the addition of three games.
The 2016-17 Bowl Schedule has not been officially announced yet, but it appears that it will kick off on Saturday, Dec. 17. The full schedule should be finalized later this month.
College Football Bowl Schedule
I was looking at the Bowl Schedules page, and it shows the Bahamas Bowl between American and C-USA………is that a gremlin, or has it changed from the MAC?
It’s actually C-USA vs. MAC with American as a backup according to link below:
http://pilotonline.com/sports/college/old-dominion/football/harry-minium/conference-usa-will-have-six-bowl-bids-this-season-and/article_d38afbcc-ad3b-539c-b683-efd4a9300a44.html
Cut Bowls to 20…….no 7-5 team, much less a 6-6 team, deserves a bowl game.
I don’t have number, but they need to be reduced, bowl games allow fans to go someplace and coaches to keep their jobs. I don’t have a plan but reduce them by about 20.
Playing in a Bowl Game should be a reward for players. Now it means nothing because everyone plays in a Bowl. Need to reduce the current number!! One good thing the NCAA has done. That doesn’t occur very often!!
The only thing they have to do is just make some of the bowl games be semi-final games for other bowl games that become championship games. Excluding the NY6 bowls and championship game, you have 34 bowl games. Two of the NY6 bowl games and 10 other bowl games could be championship games for the winners of the lower 24 bowl games. That makes 26 semi-final bowls that goes to 13 championship bowl games, plus 2 other bowls. That makes the team requirement go down from 80 to 52, without losing any bowls. That’s all it takes!
Only 41 bowl games? Gee, what a shame! Don’t know what I’m going to do without that 42nd, 43rd, and 44th bowl to watch! :)
If in three years they add more bowls then they should add the number of teams eligible for bowls. I think that Big Sky, MVFC, Southland, OVC, and CAA top teams can all compete with FBS schools. That being said, why not have some FCS conferences move up to FBS so schools like Coastal Carolina won’t have to change conferences just to move up to FBS. After all, FBS and FCS are all division 1. Why shouldn’t all division 1 teams be able to compete in same postseason? It’s not like basketball or baseball has a division within division 1. This would justify adding more bowl games, and then only teams with +.500 records could make it
Evan, I’d agree that FCS teams that are *above* .500, that did not receive one of the FCS playoff spots, might could be considered bowl eligible. There’s almost always a CAA team left out of the mix with a decent record like 7-4… that would be a lot better than any 5-7 team let into a bowl.
Sanity has returned!
Expand the playoffs to 16 teams. 10 Conference champs and 6 at-large. Use the bowls as play-ins. Round 1 Liberty, Holiday, Citrus, Outback, Independence, Taxslayer, Alamo, and Cactus. Round 2 Sugar, Cotton, Fiesta, Peach. Round 3 Rose and Orange. And crown CFP Championship. That would leave 26 bowls for 52 additional teams… so we use the top 68 teams instead of 80. And every other college division of football can have a 16 or 24 team playoff. No reason the big schools couldn’t. Even with this, I’d still cut back the bowl games so a team would need at least 7 or 8 wins. If they keep the current system, instead of the same conferences going to the same bowls every year, I’d propose the following. After the 4 teams are selected for the CFP, they have a draft show – where each bowl gets to draft their 2 teams. That way, the bowls picking 1st could select the 2 best teams available or could go to picking a regional team that would draw better attendance…. How would the draft order be determined… by the payout of the bowl game. Before the season, each bowl submits it’s payouts to the NCAA. That way, lesser bowls might put up more money to try to get a higher draft choice. It would create more exciting matchups than Conference X #5 team vs Conference Y #7 team …. and it could generate more money for the NCAA… I’m sure they’d like that
I really want Cleveland to have a bowl game to make up for the fact that the Browns never make the playoffs…that’s gonna be on hold until 2019. And Cleveland can’t have the title game until the 2020 season at the earliest since all title sites for the next 4 years have been chosen. It would mean a lot for Cleveland to have postseason college football given the fact that the Browns themselves usually don’t make the postseason. First Energy Stadium has never hosted postseason football above the high school level.
https://www.change.org/p/college-football-playoff-committee-city-of-cleveland-ohio-bring-a-college-football-playoff-championship-game-and-yearly-minor-bowl-to-cleveland
Please sign this petition in the hope that Cleveland gets postseason college football soon.