Ryan Day hopes for changes in college football to prevent opt-outs

College football bowl season has become a shell of itself in some ways, mainly due to the proliferation of opt-outs and transfers following the conclusion of the regular season.

With some teams not fielding anything close to a full roster for their bowl games, attributing meaning to such games seems to become a bit of a foolhardy task.

Ohio State coach Ryan Day wants to see some changes.

“I hope so. I hope there’s something, because you have key pieces missing and it’s just not the same team that you played with a month ago,” Day said. “But that’s (no) excuse, it’s just the way it is. We’ve got to go win the game. But I feel like absolutely. Maybe with the playoff that will change things as well.”

It’s unclear what changes might look like at the moment, but the most common suggestion seems to be altering the transfer portal window a bit. With the window for players to transfer opening up right after the conclusion of conference championship games, coaches are having to deal with turnover during bowl preparations.

NFL Draft declarations and opt-outs are also a factor, but probably not quite as large.

The problem, though, is there’s only so much you can do to move the transfer portal windows. If there has to be a window, doing it in the period when fall semesters are ending and spring semesters are beginning — like the system currently does — seems to be the most optimal setup.

Whatever the case, Day isn’t a fan of having to coach a bowl game with a handicapped roster.

He’s in alignment with his new athletics director on that, with Ross Bjork expressing his thoughts on some changes to the current model as he took over the gig this week.

“There are things that we can do right now that doesn’t take a czar,” Bjork said. “We can clean the recruiting calendar up, we can clean the transfer windows up, we can get our coaches maybe off the road in December because they need to be worried about roster retention.

“There’re things that we can do right now within the structure, where you don’t have to break away football, that would be really, really easy. But we’ve gotta get it done. And that goes back to the whole governance model where things get stuck, because everybody gets in their silos. And we gotta take those down.”