The NY6 bowls will be ok since they’re attached to the playoffs. I think the rest of the bowls may be in trouble.
The last few years they had few interesting matchups. Any small schools going to the lower to mid Boca Raton type bowls will be unchanged I think. Most of their players will play and they don’t really attract a lot of fans anyway.
The mid to upper (non NY6) type bowls will take a hit IMO. Teams that generally get selected to those games will have a lot of players sit out since they aren’t in the playoffs. I think fan interest will dwindle over time as a result.
Interesting view about the lower-tier bowls. We'll see.
I think the 12-team playoff sucks all the oxygen out of the bowl system. The focus is the battle to be one of those 12 teams and then the series of games they play.
The problem for me with the previous NY6 bowls and the range of games during Bowl Week was not uninteresting matchups though there were some of those -- there always are -- but rather matchups that became uninteresting when a team's best players, the ones who got them to the bowl, declined to play. Our matchup with Ole Miss was very interesting...until we ended up having to play with a team that in important ways did not resemble the one that earned the bid.
What I'm waiting to see now is whether this will start happening in the regular season after teams are no longer in the running to make the cut of 12.
On a related note, with the playoff format in place, I think we could also do without the conference championship games. It's possible that the winner of this year's national championship will have played 16 games. I'm old enough to remember when some expressed indignation that the regular season was expanded to 11 games. It was too much to ask of college kids, some people said. Fast-forward a few decades and we're looking at...potentially 16 and definitely 15 for the prize winner. That's quite a grind.
Right, I know, there will be much snickering at the mention of "college kids." The concept has become laughable in the new era of college football. But still.
Don't get me wrong: I love this new playoff format and have waited a very long time for it to happen. But everything good comes with a price. In any case, I don't think we need the conference championship games anymore. Good luck with that though. Dollars rule.
