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For a lot of programs, 9-3 or 8-4 is not mediocrity. It is a top-quintile outcome. It is a season fans remember. It is a season that gets a coach an extension, wakes up donors, helps recruiting, and makes people believe the program is moving.
In the old bowl ecosystem, those seasons had somewhere to go.
The Citrus Bowl, Gator Bowl, Holiday Bowl, Alamo Bowl, Sun Bowl, Liberty Bowl, Outback Bowl, Peach Bowl, Music City Bowl, Las Vegas Bowl, Pinstripe Bowl, and a bunch of others could mean different things to different programs. They were not all equal, and they were not all national-title-adjacent. But they gave teams a postseason reward that fit the scale of what that program had accomplished.
That is what the playoff era damaged.
The sport did not merely create a better championship mechanism. It centralized almost all postseason meaning into one event. ESPN, as the CFP’s exclusive rights holder, helped build and promote that hierarchy. ESPN and the CFP extended their exclusive relationship through the 2031-32 season, including rights to the playoff games, selection show, weekly rankings shows, and related programming. That is not just broadcasting the sport. That is defining the sport’s value system.
So when people say, “Why is Team 19 making the playoff better than Team 19 going to the Citrus Bowl?” the answer is: because there was a time when the Citrus Bowl carried real status. So did a lot of other bowls, depending on the program. But the sport spent a decade telling everyone that anything outside the CFP is meaningless. The meaning moved.
And once the meaning moves, the access point has to move with it.
Carey Findley@careywfindley
@BudElliott3 It never should’ve been seen as a success. If you’re not playing for a title it’s a meaningless exhibition game that players caught onto years ago and started opting out of. Making every bowl game have playoff ramifications fixes this issue.
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