6 Ways the NCAA Can Fix College Football’s Bowl Season

“The NCAA has nothing to do with the bowl season” is one of college football’s most annoying fallacies.

In reality, the NCAA wants nothing to do with college football bowl season.

It’s time they start caring. For too long, the NCAA has ceded the postseason system in its most watched sport to the Power Five conferences. In the shocker of all shockers, these conferences have only cared about their bottom line.

We’re left with a bowl season that is too long, too commercial, and too boring. Does anyone benefit from a Sun Belt team playing a MAC team in mid-December in front of 25,000 empty seats?

Well, it does benefit ESPN. That’s about it.

We know the power brokers of college football won’t change the bowl season because it works for them. The New Year’s Six and the College Football Playoff bring in more than enough money to satisfy their needs.

But the bowl system isn’t satisfying my needs as a college football fan who has long obsessed over bowl games. Therefore, I humbly suggest these six ways the NCAA can step in and fix this mess:

1) Bowls Start After Early Signing Period

The single stupidest part of bowl season is a recent development, thanks to college football’s new early signing period. The past two years, the early signing day coincided with the always thrilling Frisco Bowl. This December, it meant both San Diego State and Ohio coaches had to simultaneously sign recruits and play a football game. How stupid, right?

It makes no sense for any team to be playing on such an important day. By moving the bowls beyond the early signing period, not only are you giving every single FBS team an equal shake, you are ending the ridiculous early bowl games that ESPN has grown to love.

Seriously, there were a handful of bowl games on Dec. 15 last year. This was only two weeks after the regular season ended. There wasn’t even a bye week after Army/Navy! One of the reasons bowl games were so successful is that fans had to wait weeks – excruciatingly long weeks – until football came back.

If no bowl game is ever played again before Dec. 22, I’ll be happy.

2) 5,000 Free Tickets (at least) for Each Team

We know the song and dance by now. Team A is selected for a bowl game. Team A begs and pleads with fans to buy their tickets, and not the super cheap tickets on StubHub, to help line the pockets of bowl executives.

Just stop it. There is no reason why colleges should be forced to buy tickets for family members or bands. Isn’t the point to create a college football atmosphere in a neutral site?

By giving away (at least) 10,000 tickets, bowl games will ensure at least people will be in the stands, while still having plenty of tickets to sell and make money. The majority of these games are merely TV shows at this point.

You wouldn’t send Stephen Colbert out there to perform in front of empty seats.

3) 20,000 Minimum Attendance

It’s really annoying during bowl season to know some kids are playing their final football game ever and their audience is 40,000 empty seats.

The NCAA requires schools to achieve a 15,000 minimum attendance average to continue playing FBS football. Why can’t they do the same for bowl games? Get an average of at least 20,000 people in the stadium over 3 years – I don’t care if they are paid to attend – and you can keep your bowl game.

4) Transfers & Redshirts Can Play

The bowl season, for every team outside of the New Year’s Six, is an exhibition. Sure, some games mean more to some schools than other, but generally, the games don’t really matter.

We’ve seen this new reality in action over the past few years as surefire (and some not so surefire) NFL draft picks skip the bowl game to prepare for the Scouting Combine. I have absolutely 0.0% problem with this. They aren’t getting paid. Good for them.

But it does create a vacuum of stars. So why not embrace the bowl season’s existence as the launching pad to the following year by allowing transfers and redshirts to play without impacting eligibility?

The redshirt rule has already been relaxed to allow for 4 games to be played before the redshirt is pulled. Florida’s Dan Mullen provided a bit of a blueprint, when he gave Emory Jones only 3 games in the regular season so he could play in the Peach Bowl. Let’s expand this to all redshirts.

For transfers, it only makes sense. They’ve been out all year. Give them one game to enjoy life with their new teammates and start to find their way. If coaches can “transfer” without missing one game, I think players deserve to get one game back.

5) Conferences Get 4 Guaranteed Spots

Can the NCAA limit the number of bowl games that conferences have agreements with? Probably not. Still, they should.

While it makes sense for the top tier bowls to ensure they have the best teams playing, things get really silly where bowls are matching the 8th pick from the Big Ten against the 7th pick from the ACC, or some nonsense.

With how the New Year’s Six is structured, it creates weird imbalances. The BCS limited the number of teams from one conference in the big bowls and the New Year’s Six does not. That is a good thing, because if the SEC or Big Ten produce 3 or 4 worthy teams, they deserve to play in the biggest games.

However, it’s killing the lower level bowls by creating weird, uneven matchups, of 8- and 9-win teams playing 6-win teams. Furthermore, it’s crushing the Group of Five teams, who scramble to play each other in empty stadiums before Christmas, which only deepens the perception they’re playing a different sport than the Power Five.

Capitalism isn’t always good. It’s great here. Let the bowl games make the best matchups possible and leave the tie-ins for 6-win teams in the past.

6) Stadiums Can Only Host 1 Bowl

This is aimed fairly specifically at Orlando, but others have tried and rumors are others will try again. There is simply no reason for the Citrus Bowl, now Camping World Stadium, to host three bowl games.

It’s beyond pathetic to watch the Cure Bowl played in front of 60,000 empty seats, especially when UCF has a perfectly suitable stadium in the same city that seats 40,000.

It’s even worse to watch a quality matchup between Syracuse and West Virginia played in front of 30,000 empty seats, despite a sea of Orange enveloping Orlando. Why did this happen? Because the locals only go to one game and they’re going to go to the real Citrus Bowl on New Year’s Day.

Imagine if that Syracuse/West Virginia game was played in Jacksonville for the Gator Bowl. That would have been a much larger crowd because the locals would have attended if their bowl had a top 20 matchup. Instead, the Gator Bowl had Texas A&M playing an inferior NC State team and no one cared.

That, ultimately, is the goal of these suggestions. We need to make people care about the bowls again.

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