On Saturday night, after a 60-point victory more befitting of early September than late December, Georgia coach Kirby Smart used his pulpit to point out the obvious. Florida State was missing most of its offensive and defensive production due to opt-outs and injury. And the game was ugly to the point of embarrassing for a sport that used to celebrate all aspects of its postseason.
“People need to see what happened tonight and they need to fix this,” Smart said. “It needs to be fixed. It’s very unfortunate that they, who have a good football team and a good football program, are in the position they’re in. Everybody can say it’s their fault and it’s not our problem. They can say we had our guys, and they didn’t have their guys. I can listen to all that. But college football has to decide what they want.
GO DEEPER
In painful Orange Bowl, UGA and FSU both showed CFP why change had to come
“I know things are changing, and some things are going to change next year (with the 12-team College Football Playoff). There are going to still be bowl games outside of those. People have got to decide what they want and what they want to get out of it. Because it’s really unfortunate for those kids on that sideline that had to play in that game that didn’t have their full arsenal. And it affected the game, 100 percent.”
Smart identified an issue but did not suggest any solutions. So, I’ll do that for him. Here are five ways to fix college football’s bowl season and prevent mass opt-outs.
1. More silliness! If we’ve learned anything from the first-ever Pop-Tart Bowl, it’s that people have an insatiable desire to watch a goofy-looking mascot dance around a field — with security guards, cops and officials alike — before happily descending to its death in a giant toaster. I loved every bit of it, and so did all of you. That game averaged 4.31 million viewers on ESPN, the largest audience for bowl games through Dec. 29. And it was fun! We watched because of the gimmicks and the genuine excitement from the Kansas State players to eat the giant “edible” mascot when it was all over. (I streamed the postgame ceremony to make sure I didn’t miss a thing.)
Bowl games that aren’t part of the College Football Playoff apparatus should continue to lean into the silliness because it’s what differentiates these games from the regular season. Bowl games are supposed to be fun. They’re supposed to be a reward for players at the end of the year, and what’s better than getting to eat a giant Pop-Tart? Or watching your head coach get doused in mayo? Food sponsors are certainly getting a great return on investment — the Pop-Tarts Bowl generated $12,098,187 in earned media according to Apex Marketing — and the weirder, the better. I had a cousin who knows nothing about sports texting me Pop-Tart mascot memes. I hope she keeps sending them.
2. Allow bowls to directly pay players to play. Now, I understand you’d need the NCAA to change its rules to allow direct pay-for-play in this circumstance, but the national governing body is already moving in the direction of allowing schools to sign their own athletes to NIL deals, so this isn’t too far of a stretch. Plus, we already know that NIL collectives combined with the transfer portal have created what is essentially pay-for-play, anyway. You could also have collectives include bowl clauses in their contracts with players. Either way, this won’t stop all opt-outs for potential first- and second-round NFL Draft picks, but it might help incentivize participation for mid/late-round guys and/or those on the fence about transferring.
Even if it doesn’t make a huge difference, it at least matches the fact that coaches trigger bonuses by making and winning bowl games. So, the players could get paid for participating just like their coaches.
3. Abandon conference affiliations, so bowls can set up matchups that make the most sense. Some won’t like the idea of abandoning direct conference tie-ins, but turning the system into a free-for-all is an easy way to address varying levels of motivation heading into the non-CFP portion of the postseason. If they take away the tiering based on record then you encourage teams to close the season on a strong note to become more desirable to the bowls. Some bowls would rather have a team that might be 7-5 but has won three straight conference games to reach a win total it hadn’t hit in years rather than a team that went 9-3 or 8-4 but limped to the finish line.
I’d also suggest that we allow teams that don’t want to participate to decline bids. We’ve seen teams do this before (and certainly during the 2020 COVID-19-impacted season), but for a team like Florida State this season, that wasn’t a real option, even though everyone knew that team was not interested in competing against Georgia in the Orange Bowl after being left out of the four-team CFP. The Seminoles didn’t owe the Orange Bowl anything, and I think both sides would have preferred that Georgia play a team that wanted to prepare and play them.
4. Get rid of the early signing period. You can’t move the transfer portal window back because athletes need to be able to enroll in their new schools at the start of the semester in January. The CFP is expanding, so December will be even busier next year with first-round games on campus and then an additional quarterfinal round. The only realistic option of what can move is the early signing period. It’s creating absolute chaos for coaches, who have to manage bowl prep, the portal, staffing changes and also recruiting all at once.
After Auburn lost 31-13 to Maryland in the Music City Bowl, Tigers head coach Freeze was asked to assess the team’s game plan. “Well, obviously I don’t feel like it was an effective one,” Freeze told reporters. “I didn’t get too involved in it for most of the part until this week because of recruiting, and really wanted to kind of evaluate everything about our program.”
Essentially, Freeze said he opted out of game prep but showed up to stand on the sidelines. If we take the early signing period out of December and alleviate the pressure and immediacy of recruiting, we can return the signing period to February where it can be celebrated and not buried amid the other important events in December. February’s NSD used to be equivalent to a national holiday. Let’s bring that back and move one part of the sport’s offseason truly to its offseason.
5. Reframe the way we talk about college football and the way we celebrate the sport in the 12-team CFP era. This needs to be a collective effort — from pundits to fans to coaches and administrators. We need to stop framing everything as national championship or bust. This is how you get Ohio State players opting out of the Rose Bowl or Florida State players skipping the Orange Bowl, all because they’re not playing for a chance to win a national championship. We used to celebrate rebuilding teams hitting benchmarks like bowl eligibility or a non-blue blood reaching the 10-win mark.
Ole Miss just won 11 games for the first time in program history, and we should take time to celebrate these achievements and not ignore teams as soon as they lose a game or two and fall out of CFP contention. Some of the best stories in the sport this year were in places like Columbia, Mo., and Tucson, Ariz. But if you look at college football only through the lens of national championship contenders, you’ll miss out on amazing moments, true joy and genuine team building. And those are things that drew us into this sport in the first place and what should keep us here now.
We should stop worrying about bowl season being “broken.” We don’t need to worry about the feelings of bowl and TV executives. We can and should enjoy what non-CFP bowl games have become — exhibitions — for what they are because we won’t have college football for eight months. Sometimes, it’s better to simply appreciate what we have even if it isn’t perfect. And that’s OK.
(Photo: Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)
2023-12-31 20:02:48
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