As the college football season comes to a close soon, it’s important to acknowledge the changes in the system that will affect the sport as a whole. With the 12-team playoff now, the transfer portal, and the NIL garbage, college football is very different than the “traditional” model most people had known for the last 70 years or so. This begs the question: do we even need bowl games anymore? The answer should be no.

If a school doesn’t make the championship playoff, the motivation for fans to travel and see their team play a meaningless game (often without the best players, who will opt out to stay healthy for the NFL Draft) is minimal. Only the most diehard zealots will go, really: this has been clear for years, in terms of schools being unable to sell their allotment of tickets to bowl games that had no impact on national championships.

The transfer portal also has impacted these games as it’s not just the best players sitting out in order to avoid injury before going “pro”—other top players are entering the transfer portal in order to either go to a better team next year or get paid more by another school next year, thus rendering the roster nothing like the one that earned the bowl-game invite in the first place. This is decimating teams’ personnel as well.

Finally, the NIL stuff contributes to these issues in terms of exacerbating the exodus from non-playoff teams, flooding the transfer portal with “free agents” in the process. These again are the best players on “non-championship” teams that think they can do better next season elsewhere, one way or another. So, which fans really want to go see their team play with a roster full of nobodies they barely recognize?

We’ve gone to these games over the years: the 2001 Silicon Valley Bowl; the 2012 Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl; the 2022 Jimmy Kimmel Bowl; etc. Progressively, the experience has gotten worse, as it’s just not worth it to the fans to watch their teams play meaningless games with unknown players. Many studies have shown that most school lose money on these games, even if the “exposure” allegedly used to help in recruiting.

Recruiting itself means less now, since so many players end up transferring to other schools long before they graduate/get drafted. Just as an example, in the last 10 seasons (2014-2023), the Heisman Trophy winner has won the award while not playing for the first school he attended in five of those seasons. The transfer portal is only going to get worse now, too, so this trend will accelerate going forward to be worse.

So, why go to a bowl game? Good question: there’s really little, if any, benefit to playing in a bowl game. As the book Death to the BCS noted about 15 years ago, the whole bowl system is really just a grifting exercise for the bowl organizers. It’s about time college football comes to its senses and ends the charade of these meaningless games that only hurt the schools and teams financially. No one’s watching, anyway, really.