The future of college football's bowl games rests with the conferences and their television partners, and neither has said what it wants as the College Football Playoff closes in on 24 teams, Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli told CBS Sports. Roughly six bowl executives gathered in Irving, Texas, last week to discuss the future of college football's bowl season. They represented a cross-section of Group of Six and Power Four bowl games.
Some of them have spent decades in a business that, for most of that time, renewed itself every few years with little more than a handshake and a few signatures. That era is over, and they know it. Now they're trying to prepare for a postseason being redrawn around them by people who haven't finished the blueprint.
The College Football Playoff is on the verge of doubling its field to 24 teams starting in 2027 after reaching a handshake agreement, according to multiple reports. Nearly $350 million will be added to the $1.3 billion deal with ESPN, which is expected to run six years, the typical length for the CFP contract and the separate deals among the Bowl Season's 35 bowl games serving 10 conferences. The bowls' agreements with their conference partners, which ran six years to mirror the CFP cycle, expire after this season, and so do their television deals.
CFP expansion will pull 12 more teams out of the bowl pool, nearly all of them from Power Four conferences. The first two rounds are expected to be played on campuses, with the New Year's Six bowls hosting the quarterfinals and semifinals. "I would say that it's too soon to predict the number of bowl games moving forward," Carparelli told CBS Sports.
"But I think it's safe to say that, as a complementary part of college football's postseason, there will still be more teams playing in bowl games than are participating in the playoff." He added: "The bowl system is not going anywhere." The bowl system might not disappear, but it could change drastically. How many games survive is the question nobody will answer. The bowl lineup already turned over this year.
The LA Bowl and Detroit's GameAbove Sports Bowl are gone, replaced by the new Puerto Rico Bowl and the returning Poinsettia Bowl. That makes 35 bowl games for a system that is still a ratings win for ESPN, though conferences worry about dwindling returns as the playoff expands to 24 teams. Michigan and Texas drew 9.1 million viewers in last season's Citrus Bowl.
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