One of the biggest arguments against expanding the college football playoff is the worry that it will make bowl games less meaningful. Unlike the argument that it would make the regular season less meaningful, which I thoroughly debunked in a previous article, this one might have some merit.
According to sportsbusinessjournal.com, despite the fact that non-CFP bowl games theoretically should've been unaffected when the New Year's Six, which had 12 teams, turned into a college football playoff that also had 12 teams, the average attendance for non-CFP bowl games has dropped by 7% since the playoff expanded. If it expands to 24 teams, the effect will be much more severe because bowl games like the Citrus Bowl and Alamo Bowl that normally feature ranked teams will no longer be able to. (Unless they become part of the CFP, which would totally make sense.)
But as a BYU fan, guess what? I don't care if bowl games become less important. Here's why:
In 2015, BYU hit the jackpot on Selection Sunday. They got a chance to play Utah in the Las Vegas Bowl. At the time, the Cougs had lost four straight against the Utes, and they were in the middle of a three-year gap between Holy Wars. I was thrilled to find out we weren't going to have to wait any longer for our next chance to end the streak. Yes, we lost, but I was really happy that we got a shot to get our biggest win of the season.
And then, the next ten years happened.
BYU football's bowl season nightmare begins
Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I have nothing against any of the bowl games BYU has played in since then or the teams they've played against. These have all been great bowl games against great teams. That's not the issue. It's just that I generally get more satisfaction when BYU beats some teams than when they beat others.
For one thing, I prefer to play teams from better conferences, not because I like those conferences more than the others, but because I like to believe the gaps between conferences is smaller than people think, and while beating a team from a better conference generally helps prove that that's true, beating a team from a worse conference only helps prove that that's false.
For another thing, I prefer to play teams we have a losing streak against because it gives us a chance to break that streak, whereas if we have a winning streak against them, they're the ones who have a chance to end it. That being said, let's go through all the bowl game draws BYU's gotten since that amazing one in 2015.
In 2016, we were 8-4 with all 4 of our losses coming in close games against high-caliber teams, and we had three P5 wins, so you could argue we deserved a chance to play against a P5 team. But we already knew we were going to the Poinsettia Bowl and playing a team from the Mountain West Conference. We ended up drawing 8-5 Wyoming. Now, if I had had any clue that their quarterback, Josh Allen, was going to become one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, I would've been much more excited about this game, but at the time, it didn't feel like a satisfying grand finale. We had won 7 straight games against them by an average of 28.4 points. We won this game by 3, so all we ended up proving was that we were a little better than a team we used to be a lot better than.
After not qualifying for a bowl game in the Bruno season (that's what I call the 2017 season because we don't talk about it), we bounced back in 2018 with a 6-6 season that included a road win against a top 10 Wisconsin team. Unlike in 2016 when our bowl game had already been determined before the season started, there were actually multiple possibilities. I wasn't expecting to play a top 25 team or anything like that, but I was thinking it would be either a 6-6 P5 team or a 9-3 G5 team. It ended up being 7-5 Western Michigan in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. The one reason I was excited to play the Broncos was because they had just gone to the Orange Bowl two years before, but even still, after a Bruno ending to the regular season, winning this game by 31 points didn't do a lot to alleviate my pain. Also, while nobody remembers or cares, BYU and Western Michigan had played five times in the 1960's, and BYU had won the last two.
In 2019, my desire to play a P5 team was especially strong because we hadn't played a P5 team since September. Unfortunately, we were already destined to go to the Hawaii Bowl. I'm sure this was exciting for the people who actually got to go to Hawaii, but for someone who was going to be watching the game at their home in Orem, Utah no matter what, all I cared about was the opponent. For virtually the entire second half of the season, almost all of the bowl projections had us playing a road game against Hawaii. Nothing against the Rainbow Warriors. They were a great team that year. I just wasn't too excited about ending our season the same way we had ended the Bruno season. We had a 5 game winning streak against them, so we had more to lose than to gain. Sure enough, this is the matchup we ended up with, and we lost our streak.
My desire to play a P5 team was even stronger in 2020 because every single one of our P5 games had been canceled because of COVID. Throughout the season, I was desperately hoping that we'd be able to schedule a P5 game, but we never did. We had such a great team that year, but not a lot of great teams to prove it against. When the season started, it looked like we might play in our biggest bowl game in decades because with all the teams that weren't playing, bowl games were going to have to take whoever they could get.
But then, not only did the Big 10 and Pac-12 decide to join the party, but a lot of the bowl games left the party, so after just missing out on the New Years Six, we had to take whatever bowl game we could get. It was like a dating site going from having twice as many women as men to having twice as many men as women. I was actually kind of glad to get 6-3 UCF, which is sad because at 10-1, we deserved better. At least we were able to end our 1-game losing streak against the Knights. This was literally the only time in this entire stretch we got to play a team who had won the most recent game against us.
And then 2021 happened. BYU was 10-2 and hoping for a spot in the New Years Six. Unfortunately, they were the first team out thanks to the fact that Utah technically won the Pac-12 instead of BYU even though the Cougars were 5-0 against the Pac-12 including a win over Utah. But at least when you're the first team out of the New Years Six, you still get to play in one of the best other bowl games, like the Citrus Bowl or the Alamo Bowl, right? Nope. Not if you're an independent who isn't Notre Dame. We had already agreed to play in the Independence Bowl against a Conference USA team.
But at the very least, you would expect that if a team from a G5 conference is going to play against a ranked team, they would send their best team, which was clearly 12-1 UTSA, who BYU had only beaten by 7 points the year before, right? Nope. Someone decided it would be a better idea to have UTSA play San Diego St in the Frisco Bowl and have 8-4 UAB play BYU instead. And then, to make matters worse, UAB made us all feel stupid for whining about it by actually winning the game. Regardless, this was a prime example of how stupid the way bowl games work is. (Notably, this was the first time we had ever played UAB, so neither of us had a streak.)
I'm not going to whine too much about 2022 because at 7-5, playing a 7-5 SMU team from the best G5 conference was a pretty fair draw, even though we did have a 3-game winning streak against the Mustangs. Still, I was glad to finally be going to the Big 12 where I knew that even if we went 6-6, we would still probably end up in a bigger bowl game than all of the ones we had gone to as an independent.
We started the first Big 12 season 5-2, and I could taste it. All the bowl projections were exciting. All we had to do was win one of our last five games. And then Bruno happened. Let's move on.
Our hopes came back in 2024 when we shocked everyone, starting the season 9-0. Forget bowl eligibility. We were thinking about the college football playoff. That, of course, did not end up happening because we lost 2 of our last 3 games. But at least this time, we knew we were still going to a really big bowl game, and I was thrilled about the Alamo Bowl... except there was a catch. In the Pac-2's desperate attempt to stay alive, they had held on to their bowl contracts, meaning all the teams that had ditched them still had to go to their bowl games. This should've been fine for us because there were six Pac-12 teams that went to other P4 conferences besides the Big 12, and the Alamo Bowl was going to have the first pick from those six teams after the CFP. But due to absurd luck, one of those six teams went to the CFP, and the other five all fell short of bowl eligibility.
This gave the Alamo Bowl two options: take a Washington St team that went 8-4 against a schedule with only two P4 teams, or have BYU play a team from their own conference. I definitely think they made the right choice having us play Colorado, and it was pretty exciting to play against a team with two Heisman candidates, even if we were coming in with a 2-game winning streak against the Buffaloes. However, by that point, I had become a big advocate for the Big 12, and it certainly wasn't ideal for them to have two of their best teams playing each other instead of having a chance to earn some respect for the Big 12 against teams from other conferences.
And now, we've reached 2025, our most recent season. I won't go into how we definitely should've made the playoff because we had a better record and strength of schedule than both Notre Dame and Miami and no 11-1 team had ever been outside the top 10 going into champ week let alone a team with two top 25 wins and the best strength of schedule ranking in their conference which had an 8-6 record against the other P4 conferences and because both of their losses were to the same top 5 team which was also the case for Texas the year before when they got the 5 seed despite having a worse strength of schedule than BYU and no top 25 wins (so much for me not going into that) but even after missing the playoff, it still looked like we had some great postseason options.
Unlike last year, the Alamo Bowl actually had a decent Pac-12 option outside the Big 12 with 9-3 USC, who they did end up taking. And there was no way the Alamo Bowl wasn't going to take 11-2 BYU, right? Except they didn't. They took an 8-4 TCU team that BYU had beaten by 31 points. (This is one example of why I scratch my head when people say that regular season games are more important than they will be if the playoff expands.)
At first, though, I was actually happy that the Alamo Bowl didn't take BYU because there was a rumor that the Pop Tarts Bowl was going to take Notre Dame, and outside of the playoff, there was no other team I would've gotten more pleasure from beating because we had a 4 game losing streak against them and because of the way they had failed to give us the home game they had been promising for over a decade. But no. They decided that instead of taking their opportunity on the field to prove that they deserved to be in the playoff, they would protest against the utter audacity of being left out of the playoff when they didn't have a better strength of schedule or a better record than any of the teams that got an at large bid.
So instead, BYU ended up playing 9-3 Georgia Tech who they had a three game winning streak against. At least they had a chance to help the Big 12 prove themselves against the ACC... which they apparently hadn't already done by going 6-1 against them in the regular season.
Now do you see why I don't care about bowl games being phased out? The way bowl matchups work makes about as much sense as Zeitl getting matched up with Lazar Wolf. And just like in "Fiddler on the Roof," it's all in the name of "tradition". People keep saying, "If it aint broke, don't fix it," but I've got news for you.
College football has always been broke, and it has always needed fixing. At least with a 24 team playoff, any team ranked in the top 24 will have a chance to play another team ranked in the top 24. And this isn't even the most important reason that I support playoff expansion. I support it because the bigger the playoff is, the more the national championship will be decided on the field, and the less it will be decided by a bunch of people sitting in a room. If we have to push aside flawed tradtions to make that happen, let's do it.
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