Originally published December 2025. Updated May 2026 with current bowl closures, CFP expansion status, and post-season developments.
The college football bowl system is collapsing in slow motion. Three bowls have folded in the last six months. Programs are walking away from invitations. A bowl executive told Brett McMurphy the system is “officially dead.” Star players opt out routinely. Entire teams now do it too.
This isn’t one bad weekend or one snubbed program. It’s a structural unwinding driven by the College Football Playoff, ESPN’s media leverage, the transfer portal, and NIL economics. Every force pulling at college football right now points the same direction — and bowl games outside the playoff bracket are getting pulled apart first.
The moment that made it undeniable came in December 2025, when Notre Dame walked.
Spring 2026 Update
Five months after Notre Dame walked away from a bowl bid, the trajectory has gotten clearer. The CFP voted on January 23 to stay at 12 teams for 2026 — Big Ten and SEC commissioners couldn’t agree on whether to expand to 16 or 24, so nothing happened. The deadline to change the format for 2027 is December 1, 2026.
While the playoff debated itself, the bowl system kept shrinking. The LA Bowl folded after last December’s game. The Bahamas Bowl is gone. The Detroit Bowl — 29 years old, most recently the GameAbove Sports Bowl — was canceled in February. That’s three bowls eliminated in two months. The 2026 schedule will have 44 bowls instead of 47.
A new wrinkle: a 14-person presidential committee is now shaping the playoff conversation. It includes ESPN and Fox executives, the Big Ten and SEC commissioners, Notre Dame’s AD, and Cody Campbell — a Texas billionaire and Trump ally who chairs the group. The White House supports its existence. Whatever the future of college football looks like, it’s no longer being negotiated only by athletic directors.
The original story below is from December 2025. The structural argument — that the bowl system as we knew it is gone — has only gotten stronger.
What Actually Happened
Notre Dame looked poised for the College Football Playoff. The selection committee had ranked them ahead of Miami in every set of rankings all season. Then, on Selection Sunday, the committee flipped them. Miami jumped from No. 12 to No. 10. Notre Dame dropped to No. 11. Neither team had played that weekend.
The committee’s explanation? Miami’s head-to-head win over Notre Dame back in Week 1. A game that apparently didn’t matter for six straight weeks of rankings until suddenly it did.
Rather than accept a spot in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, Holiday Bowl, or Gator Bowl—games that would have killed for Notre Dame’s brand—the team’s captains voted to opt out entirely. No bowl game. Season over.
Stewart Mandel of The Athletic nailed it: “The No. 11 team in the country opting out of a bowl game says the quiet part out loud: The big programs are CFP or bust now.”
Notre Dame wasn’t alone. Kansas State’s head coach, Chris Klieman, retired during the week. Iowa State’s Matt Campbell left for Penn State. Both programs declined their bowl invitations. The Big 12 fined each school $500,000 for walking away.
The bowl system needed every available 6-win team to fill its 82 slots. When three programs declined, organizers scrambled to the pool of 5-7 teams. Florida State said no. Auburn said no. UCF, Baylor, Kansas, Rutgers, and Temple all said no. Appalachian State finally stepped up to play Georgia Southern in the Birmingham Bowl, filling the last spot at the eleventh hour.
How We Got Here
New Year’s Day used to be a holiday for college football. Games all day. Meaningful matchups between teams that rarely played each other. The Rose Bowl was Pac-10 vs. Big Ten, every year, no exceptions. Winning a major bowl was an achievement that programs celebrated for decades.
The two-team BCS Championship started the erosion, but bowl games still carried weight. The four-team playoff changed the math. Suddenly, the Rose Bowl might feature the second-place Big Ten team instead of the champion. If your team wasn’t in the playoffs, the season felt incomplete, no matter what bowl you won.
The 12-team playoff finished the job. With more paths to a championship, every bowl outside the playoff bracket became a participation trophy. The message to elite programs: if you’re not in the playoffs, your season is already over.
Player opt-outs normalized the attitude before entire programs adopted it. Jaylon Smith tore his ACL and LCL in the Fiesta Bowl on New Year’s Day 2016 and watched his draft stock crater—from a projected top-5 pick to second round. Christian McCaffrey sat out Stanford’s Sun Bowl that same season. Leonard Fournette skipped LSU’s Citrus Bowl. The trickle became a flood as top NFL prospects decided the risk wasn’t worth it.
But individual players protecting their future is different than entire programs refusing to compete. Notre Dame crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed.
Follow the Money
Notre Dame’s decision wasn’t purely emotional. It was financial.
ESPN owns 17 bowl games outright and broadcasts most of the rest. When Notre Dame declines a bowl, ESPN doesn’t get Notre Dame content, eyeballs, or advertising revenue. The Irish essentially said: If you’re not putting us in the playoff, you don’t get to profit off us in a lesser game.
There’s a broader tension here. ESPN has massive investments in SEC content. The perception that ESPN advocates for SEC teams in playoff discussions isn’t paranoia—it’s pattern recognition. Alabama lost to Georgia by 21 points in the SEC Championship and didn’t drop a spot. BYU lost and fell. Notre Dame didn’t play and fell. The inconsistency was glaring, and Notre Dame noticed.
ESPN might not even be upset. They own the CFP broadcast rights, too. Their thinking is that if bowl games go away, then the playoff can expand; that’s acceptable math. The people who built this system are the same ones watching it collapse.
Some bowls have figured out the new reality. The Pop-Tarts Bowl and Duke’s Mayo Bowl stopped pretending they were prestigious sporting events and leaned into spectacle. The mascot sacrifice. The Mayo bath. They made the sponsor the story, and it works.
Most bowls haven’t adapted. They’re still trading on tradition, and tradition is a depreciating asset.
Who Didn’t Get a Vote
Notre Dame’s captains voted to opt out. That’s the story. But did every player want this?
What about the walk-on receiver who might never see another meaningful snap? The sophomore linebacker buried on the depth chart who wanted one more chance to prove himself on national TV? The senior whose family couldn’t wait to watch him in person one more time?
“The team decided” doesn’t mean every player agreed. Leadership made a statement. Some kids just lost an opportunity.
The fans got nothing either. Notre Dame fans would watch their team play on a deserted field in Oklahoma. A bowl game is still a game—three more weeks of anticipation, a trip to a warm-weather city in December, one more chance to tailgate and watch the Irish take the field. Instead, nothing.
Meanwhile, Appalachian State and Georgia Southern will play in Birmingham. For those programs, a bowl game is a big deal. National TV exposure. A reward for a winning season. The smaller programs still want to be there. Notre Dame can afford to walk away. App State can’t. That gap tells you everything about where this sport is headed.
The Bigger College Football Picture
The bowl system dying is a symptom. The disease is bigger.
NIL created a pay-for-play environment with no guardrails. The transfer portal turned roster management into year-round free agency. National signing day now lands between rivalry week and conference championship games, forcing coaches to recruit while preparing for their biggest games. Coaches get hired and fired during bowl prep. The season stretches into late January. The NFL Combine is in late February, the draft in April.
Nobody is in charge. Everyone is making it up as they go. The only consistent principle is money.
A commenter in the r/CFB Reddit thread put it bluntly: “College football is basically just becoming a sh*tty NFL with college logos attached and zero regulations on free agency.”
Harsh. Directionally accurate.
What Happens Next to College Football Bowl Games
The playoff will expand again. When it does, more bowl games become irrelevant. The tier below the playoff will thin out. Some bowls will die. Others will survive by becoming spectacles rather than sporting events.
Conference championship games might be next. If the playoff expands to 16 or 24 teams, what’s the point of a conference title game that might cost you a seed or get your players hurt? The same logic that killed bowl games will eventually kill conference championships. Those should probably be gone already.
The bowl executive was right. The system we knew is dead. The question now is what replaces it.
FAQ: Why College Football Bowl Games Are Dying
Why did Notre Dame opt out of their bowl game?
Notre Dame was ranked ahead of Miami in every CFP ranking all season until Selection Sunday, when the committee swapped them despite neither team playing that weekend. The team’s captains voted to decline all bowl invitations after being left out of the 12-team playoff.
Which teams declined bowl games in 2025?
Notre Dame, Kansas State, and Iowa State all declined as bowl-eligible teams. Florida State, Auburn, UCF, Baylor, Kansas, Rutgers, and Temple declined as 5-7 teams who were offered spots to fill the gaps.
Why were Kansas State and Iowa State fined?
The Big 12 fined both schools $500,000 each for opting out of their bowl commitments. The conference cited its contractual obligations to bowl partners, though both programs were in the middle of coaching changes.
How many bowl games does ESPN own?
ESPN Events owns and operates 17 bowl games outright and broadcasts most of the remaining games. ESPN also holds the broadcast rights to the College Football Playoff.
When did players start opting out of bowl games?
The modern opt-out trend started after Jaylon Smith’s devastating knee injury in the 2016 Fiesta Bowl. Christian McCaffrey and Leonard Fournette were the first high-profile players to sit out bowl games that same season, and the practice has grown every year since.
Are bowl games going away?
Some are. The LA Bowl, Bahamas Bowl, and Detroit Bowl have all folded since late 2025. Traditional bowl games outside the playoff are losing relevance as elite programs increasingly opt out. Some bowls — Pop-Tarts, Duke’s Mayo — have adapted by leaning into spectacle. Many haven’t. Further playoff expansion, expected by 2027, will likely accelerate the shrinkage.
SportsEpreneur covers the business of college football — NIL, media rights, the playoff, the money. Our analysis is cited by federal regulators, U.S. Congress, top-ranked law reviews, and university research programs. If you want to put your brand in front of an audience that actually follows the structural shifts in the sport, get in touch. Sponsor our college football coverage →
Related content
NIL Rules: What Athletes, Families, and Coaches Need to Know
Transfer Portal Pros and Cons | The Wild West of College Sports
Listen: What the NIL Gold Rush Got Wrong | Stephen Bienko of 42U
Eric Kasimov is the founder of SportsEpreneur, part of the KazSource media network. Since launching the platform in 2015, he has hosted over 500 podcast episodes, written and published more than 1,500 articles, and advised business leaders, founders, and creators on building authority through media strategy.
Through his brands — KazSource, KazCM, SportsEpreneur, and QuietLoud Studios — Eric leads teams that produce podcasts, develop brand platforms, and help companies grow through modern content ecosystems. He also scaled KazSource Insurance into a seven-figure boutique agency, providing the foundation for the broader media network he operates today.
His work has been featured in Forbes, Axios, and Front Office Sports, and his podcasts have included conversations with top founders, investors, and athletes turned entrepreneurs.
Why College Football Bowl Games Are Dying — And What Comes Next
Originally published December 2025. Updated May 2026 with current bowl closures, CFP expansion status, and post-season developments.
The college football bowl system is collapsing in slow motion. Three bowls have folded in the last six months. Programs are walking away from invitations. A bowl executive told Brett McMurphy the system is “officially dead.” Star players opt out routinely. Entire teams now do it too.
This isn’t one bad weekend or one snubbed program. It’s a structural unwinding driven by the College Football Playoff, ESPN’s media leverage, the transfer portal, and NIL economics. Every force pulling at college football right now points the same direction — and bowl games outside the playoff bracket are getting pulled apart first.
The moment that made it undeniable came in December 2025, when Notre Dame walked.
Spring 2026 Update
Five months after Notre Dame walked away from a bowl bid, the trajectory has gotten clearer. The CFP voted on January 23 to stay at 12 teams for 2026 — Big Ten and SEC commissioners couldn’t agree on whether to expand to 16 or 24, so nothing happened. The deadline to change the format for 2027 is December 1, 2026.
While the playoff debated itself, the bowl system kept shrinking. The LA Bowl folded after last December’s game. The Bahamas Bowl is gone. The Detroit Bowl — 29 years old, most recently the GameAbove Sports Bowl — was canceled in February. That’s three bowls eliminated in two months. The 2026 schedule will have 44 bowls instead of 47.
A new wrinkle: a 14-person presidential committee is now shaping the playoff conversation. It includes ESPN and Fox executives, the Big Ten and SEC commissioners, Notre Dame’s AD, and Cody Campbell — a Texas billionaire and Trump ally who chairs the group. The White House supports its existence. Whatever the future of college football looks like, it’s no longer being negotiated only by athletic directors.
The original story below is from December 2025. The structural argument — that the bowl system as we knew it is gone — has only gotten stronger.
What Actually Happened
Notre Dame looked poised for the College Football Playoff. The selection committee had ranked them ahead of Miami in every set of rankings all season. Then, on Selection Sunday, the committee flipped them. Miami jumped from No. 12 to No. 10. Notre Dame dropped to No. 11. Neither team had played that weekend.
The committee’s explanation? Miami’s head-to-head win over Notre Dame back in Week 1. A game that apparently didn’t matter for six straight weeks of rankings until suddenly it did.
Rather than accept a spot in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, Holiday Bowl, or Gator Bowl—games that would have killed for Notre Dame’s brand—the team’s captains voted to opt out entirely. No bowl game. Season over.
Stewart Mandel of The Athletic nailed it: “The No. 11 team in the country opting out of a bowl game says the quiet part out loud: The big programs are CFP or bust now.”
Notre Dame wasn’t alone. Kansas State’s head coach, Chris Klieman, retired during the week. Iowa State’s Matt Campbell left for Penn State. Both programs declined their bowl invitations. The Big 12 fined each school $500,000 for walking away.
The bowl system needed every available 6-win team to fill its 82 slots. When three programs declined, organizers scrambled to the pool of 5-7 teams. Florida State said no. Auburn said no. UCF, Baylor, Kansas, Rutgers, and Temple all said no. Appalachian State finally stepped up to play Georgia Southern in the Birmingham Bowl, filling the last spot at the eleventh hour.
How We Got Here
New Year’s Day used to be a holiday for college football. Games all day. Meaningful matchups between teams that rarely played each other. The Rose Bowl was Pac-10 vs. Big Ten, every year, no exceptions. Winning a major bowl was an achievement that programs celebrated for decades.
The two-team BCS Championship started the erosion, but bowl games still carried weight. The four-team playoff changed the math. Suddenly, the Rose Bowl might feature the second-place Big Ten team instead of the champion. If your team wasn’t in the playoffs, the season felt incomplete, no matter what bowl you won.
The 12-team playoff finished the job. With more paths to a championship, every bowl outside the playoff bracket became a participation trophy. The message to elite programs: if you’re not in the playoffs, your season is already over.
Player opt-outs normalized the attitude before entire programs adopted it. Jaylon Smith tore his ACL and LCL in the Fiesta Bowl on New Year’s Day 2016 and watched his draft stock crater—from a projected top-5 pick to second round. Christian McCaffrey sat out Stanford’s Sun Bowl that same season. Leonard Fournette skipped LSU’s Citrus Bowl. The trickle became a flood as top NFL prospects decided the risk wasn’t worth it.
But individual players protecting their future is different than entire programs refusing to compete. Notre Dame crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed.
Follow the Money
Notre Dame’s decision wasn’t purely emotional. It was financial.
ESPN owns 17 bowl games outright and broadcasts most of the rest. When Notre Dame declines a bowl, ESPN doesn’t get Notre Dame content, eyeballs, or advertising revenue. The Irish essentially said: If you’re not putting us in the playoff, you don’t get to profit off us in a lesser game.
There’s a broader tension here. ESPN has massive investments in SEC content. The perception that ESPN advocates for SEC teams in playoff discussions isn’t paranoia—it’s pattern recognition. Alabama lost to Georgia by 21 points in the SEC Championship and didn’t drop a spot. BYU lost and fell. Notre Dame didn’t play and fell. The inconsistency was glaring, and Notre Dame noticed.
ESPN might not even be upset. They own the CFP broadcast rights, too. Their thinking is that if bowl games go away, then the playoff can expand; that’s acceptable math. The people who built this system are the same ones watching it collapse.
Some bowls have figured out the new reality. The Pop-Tarts Bowl and Duke’s Mayo Bowl stopped pretending they were prestigious sporting events and leaned into spectacle. The mascot sacrifice. The Mayo bath. They made the sponsor the story, and it works.
Most bowls haven’t adapted. They’re still trading on tradition, and tradition is a depreciating asset.
Who Didn’t Get a Vote
Notre Dame’s captains voted to opt out. That’s the story. But did every player want this?
What about the walk-on receiver who might never see another meaningful snap? The sophomore linebacker buried on the depth chart who wanted one more chance to prove himself on national TV? The senior whose family couldn’t wait to watch him in person one more time?
“The team decided” doesn’t mean every player agreed. Leadership made a statement. Some kids just lost an opportunity.
The fans got nothing either. Notre Dame fans would watch their team play on a deserted field in Oklahoma. A bowl game is still a game—three more weeks of anticipation, a trip to a warm-weather city in December, one more chance to tailgate and watch the Irish take the field. Instead, nothing.
Meanwhile, Appalachian State and Georgia Southern will play in Birmingham. For those programs, a bowl game is a big deal. National TV exposure. A reward for a winning season. The smaller programs still want to be there. Notre Dame can afford to walk away. App State can’t. That gap tells you everything about where this sport is headed.
The Bigger College Football Picture
The bowl system dying is a symptom. The disease is bigger.
NIL created a pay-for-play environment with no guardrails. The transfer portal turned roster management into year-round free agency. National signing day now lands between rivalry week and conference championship games, forcing coaches to recruit while preparing for their biggest games. Coaches get hired and fired during bowl prep. The season stretches into late January. The NFL Combine is in late February, the draft in April.
Nobody is in charge. Everyone is making it up as they go. The only consistent principle is money.
A commenter in the r/CFB Reddit thread put it bluntly: “College football is basically just becoming a sh*tty NFL with college logos attached and zero regulations on free agency.”
Harsh. Directionally accurate.
What Happens Next to College Football Bowl Games
The playoff will expand again. When it does, more bowl games become irrelevant. The tier below the playoff will thin out. Some bowls will die. Others will survive by becoming spectacles rather than sporting events.
Conference championship games might be next. If the playoff expands to 16 or 24 teams, what’s the point of a conference title game that might cost you a seed or get your players hurt? The same logic that killed bowl games will eventually kill conference championships. Those should probably be gone already.
The bowl executive was right. The system we knew is dead. The question now is what replaces it.
FAQ: Why College Football Bowl Games Are Dying
Why did Notre Dame opt out of their bowl game?
Notre Dame was ranked ahead of Miami in every CFP ranking all season until Selection Sunday, when the committee swapped them despite neither team playing that weekend. The team’s captains voted to decline all bowl invitations after being left out of the 12-team playoff.
Which teams declined bowl games in 2025?
Notre Dame, Kansas State, and Iowa State all declined as bowl-eligible teams. Florida State, Auburn, UCF, Baylor, Kansas, Rutgers, and Temple declined as 5-7 teams who were offered spots to fill the gaps.
Why were Kansas State and Iowa State fined?
The Big 12 fined both schools $500,000 each for opting out of their bowl commitments. The conference cited its contractual obligations to bowl partners, though both programs were in the middle of coaching changes.
How many bowl games does ESPN own?
ESPN Events owns and operates 17 bowl games outright and broadcasts most of the remaining games. ESPN also holds the broadcast rights to the College Football Playoff.
When did players start opting out of bowl games?
The modern opt-out trend started after Jaylon Smith’s devastating knee injury in the 2016 Fiesta Bowl. Christian McCaffrey and Leonard Fournette were the first high-profile players to sit out bowl games that same season, and the practice has grown every year since.
Are bowl games going away?
Some are. The LA Bowl, Bahamas Bowl, and Detroit Bowl have all folded since late 2025. Traditional bowl games outside the playoff are losing relevance as elite programs increasingly opt out. Some bowls — Pop-Tarts, Duke’s Mayo — have adapted by leaning into spectacle. Many haven’t. Further playoff expansion, expected by 2027, will likely accelerate the shrinkage.
SportsEpreneur covers the business of college football — NIL, media rights, the playoff, the money. Our analysis is cited by federal regulators, U.S. Congress, top-ranked law reviews, and university research programs. If you want to put your brand in front of an audience that actually follows the structural shifts in the sport, get in touch. Sponsor our college football coverage →
Related content
NIL Rules: What Athletes, Families, and Coaches Need to Know
Transfer Portal Pros and Cons | The Wild West of College Sports
Listen: What the NIL Gold Rush Got Wrong | Stephen Bienko of 42U
Eric Kasimov is the founder of SportsEpreneur, part of the KazSource media network. Since launching the platform in 2015, he has hosted over 500 podcast episodes, written and published more than 1,500 articles, and advised business leaders, founders, and creators on building authority through media strategy.
Through his brands — KazSource, KazCM, SportsEpreneur, and QuietLoud Studios — Eric leads teams that produce podcasts, develop brand platforms, and help companies grow through modern content ecosystems. He also scaled KazSource Insurance into a seven-figure boutique agency, providing the foundation for the broader media network he operates today.
His work has been featured in Forbes, Axios, and Front Office Sports, and his podcasts have included conversations with top founders, investors, and athletes turned entrepreneurs.