Well now that Bowl season has concluded and we have a national champion in Michigan or as my buddy Robert and all Ohio State fans refer to them as TTUN. We really need to speak on the once prestigious Bowl Games. Once upon a time it was a big deal for your team to be bowl eligible, it was a chance to go play a team you normally would not be able to play in a city or environment that was different than anything you every had before. All you had to do was finish with a winning record and you qualified for a bowl. But lately bowls are useless, more and more players are opting out or sitting out due to NIL or the transfer portal.
For example the Georgia vs FSU game should have been about two teams who were hungry to prove that it was a mistake to leave them out of the playoffs, but instead what we got in essence was Georgia’s second string vs FSU’s second string. There was a total of 53 opt outs/injuries/transfers during that matchup alone. The final score reflected that as FSU was missing 86% of their offensive touchdown productions in this game. Even though Georgia won 63-3 Kirby Smart, head coach of the Georgia Bulldogs said “I can say we had our guys and they didn’t have their guys. I can listen to all that. But college football has got to decide what they want” “I know things are changing and things are going to change next year. You know what? There’s going to still be bowl games outside of those. People have got to decide what they want and what they really want to get out of it. Because it’s really unfortunate for those kids on that sideline that had to play that game that didn’t have their full arsenal. It affected the game 100 percent.”
To Kirby’s point the opt outs have been ruining bowl games for a while now but something needs to change because sooner rather than later instead of teams playing with half of their starting rosters whole teams are going to start opting out and bowl games will be filled by 5 and 4 win teams…To me I don’t see a fix even with the playoffs expanding to 12 teams next year. My suggestion would be to force these “transfer portal” kids to play the bowl game or risk having to sit out a year in order to transfer. But I still don’t think it will solve the issue at hand.