Fast. Name a bowl game that isn’t in the 2025 postseason. Rose, candy, peach, carnival, cotton, orange…they were all chosen for the playoffs. What remains is a collection of half-remembered reserved nicknames, who are keeping an eye on this curiosity and sponsor mismatch… with one notable exception:
Pie bowl. Yes, they sacrificed their mascot to be eaten by the winning team.
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In just two years, the Pop-Tarts Bowl has done what the Cheez-It Citrus, TaxSlayer Gator and Servpro First Responders Bowl couldn’t do in the CFP era: draw attention. All that is needed is this:
And this:
And, uh, this:
I would put zero of Texas Tech’s budget into creating a time machine that takes Bear Bryant and Woody Hayes to 2025…not to find out what they think about the playoffs and the portal, but to ask them what they think about college football’s embrace of “mouth heaven.”
Look, you can’t blame the Pop-Tarts Bowl (Georgia Tech vs. BYU), or the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl (Miami, Ohio vs. Fresno State) presented by Dre and Snoop’s Gin & Juice, or the Bucked Up LA Bowl (Boise State vs. Washington) hosted by Gronk, or other wacky bowls because they approach the game from a “don’t go big, be weird” angle. With the postseason sucking up all the oxygen in the college football universe, why not get weird?
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I mean, who needs to essentially display competitive playoff sportsmanship when you can throw mayonnaise over the coach’s head?
Duke’s Mayo Bowl (Wake Forest vs. Mississippi State) saw the Mayo stain begin the following year after relentless cyberbullying from the college football sick community (not an insult). This is a quick way to go viral on social media. (Bush’s Boca Raton Bean Bowl game — Toledo vs. Louisville — said he won’t throw the beans on the coach. Give it time, give it time.)
The schism that’s unfolding in the bowl world between the Big Dogs and the masses mirrors what’s happening across college football. In the playoff era, only a few teams matter, and the rest are fighting for whatever remaining scraps they can grab. For young, college-age fans, that’s standard and normal, but for anyone over the age of 30 who grew up watching the Sun Bowl and Liberty Bowl during the holiday week, there’s a sense that the traditional elements of college football are quickly disappearing.
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None of this is to mourn the loss of Bauer Industrial Park’s reputation. Bowl teams and their executives generate vast amounts of revenue each year through a combination of broadcast rights, sponsorship deals and mandatory ticket blockades, while doing everything they can to protect their turf and prevent the progression of any meaningful postseason system. These bowls were created to enrich and perpetuate themselves first and foremost, so it is no small irony that they have now been defeated and frozen out by another self-serving revenue-generating entity: the College Football Playoff.
For more than a century, bowl games have been a delightful end to the college football season, a chance to revisit your team and listen to the fight song one more time through the cold winter months and long offseasons. But the canary was chirping in this particular coal mine. Notre Dame, after days of airing its displeasure, went home with the ball. Iowa State and Kansas State opted out of their bowl games this year and were fined $500,000 by the Big 12 in the process. Multiple 5-7 teams declined to play Georgia State in the Birmingham Bowl — not because the Panthers were a formidable opponent, but because they were spread out and the “prestige” of a bowl game wasn’t enough to lure them back.
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So what’s the end result for bowl infrastructure? A gimmick is a short-term strategy, not a long-term replicable foundation. Some experts have floated the idea of moving the bowl game to the beginning of the season, which would have the benefit of becoming a national “Kickoff Classic” holiday. The bowl season at the beginning of the year will also bring back the 12 playoff teams, teams that opted out of bowls, underachievers that failed to win six games and teams that lost their temper with the Golden Dome back into the pool of possible bowl options. (Coaches often like bowl games because it gives them an extra month to practice with their teams, but a simple NCAA calendar adjustment could fix that.)
The sad truth is that in the postseason era, bowls are a relic of a long slide into irrelevance, and college football’s powers have no incentive to stem that slide. Yes, they’re here to stay — bowling remains a lucrative, low-lift activity for broadcasters, especially ESPN — but their days as the arbiters of college football history are over.
But hey, at least we’ll have peeling pie. That’s a thing, right? Correct…?
