College football’s bowl season began on Dec. 16, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, with two .500 teams squaring off in a 15,000-seat stadium in the Bahamas.
UAB’s 24-20 victory against Miami (Ohio) drew an average of 822,000 viewers to ESPN. It ended up being the least-watched of 39 bowl games on ESPN’s networks and one of only two with fewer than 1 million viewers.
For perspective, heading into a Christmas Day, NBA games on ESPN, ABC and TNT drew an average of 1.5 million viewers, according to Sports MediaWatch.
There are a lot of bowl games. It is hard to argue there are too many.
“We talk to the commissioners, the athletic directors, head football coaches on a regular basis, and there is no indication whatsoever that they want to decrease the number of opportunities for teams to play in bowl games,” said Nick Carparelli, the executive director of Bowl Season.
As college football heads toward the debut of an expanded, 12-team playoff in 2024, those involved with bowls anticipate changes from scheduling to qualification to maybe even some type of compensation to players for participating.
While the College Football Playoff has undoubtedly diminished the importance of bowl games, they are not going away. And a bigger playoff might be a chance for bowl season to reinvent itself.
“I actually think that the expanded playoff could create some needed, helpful separation,” ESPN vice president of programming Nick Dawson said. “And I think you can draw a more clear line between, these 11 games are the playoffs and this other pool of games is bowl season.”
Bowl season is no longer just a time period; it’s an organization, rebranded from the old Football Bowl Association.
Carparelli, a former associate commissioner of the Big East and Under Armour executive, advocates for bowls and tries organize them in ways they haven’t been before.
“Every bowl game is different and what the definition of success for one bowl game might be very different from another,” he said.
A bigger CFP that starts in mid-December will mean rearranging the bowl schedule around the playoff, which will likely require 11 TV windows with no competition from other college football games.
Everyone involved with the CFP has expressed a desire to bring the media rights to the expanded format to an open market after the current 12-year deal with ESPN expires in 2025. It would be surprising if a new CFP deal didn’t involve multiple networks.
Conventional wisdom suggests if another network has rights to the CFP, it would be motivated to acquire the rights to other bowls to help promote the big event.
“I do expect competition,” Dawson said.
All bowls outside the CFP have their own media rights deals, though ESPN owns and operates 17 postseason games. At the top of the bowl food chain are the so-called New Year’s Six games, currently part of the College Football Playoff semifinal rotation.
What those games strive for is to remain part of the new playoff model, which will include first-round games played on campus. Carparelli has already reached out to conference commissioners who manage the CFP, urging them to consider even more bowl participation.
