Tony Petitti addresses importance of bowl games in college football

The College Football Playoff is slated to expand to 12 teams beginning with the 2024 season, calling into question the ongoing importance of bowl games to college football as a whole.

The playoff expansion certainly has the chance to significantly change the bowl game paradigm, as more teams will be invested in the true postseason of college football. But seemingly few would propose any real alterations to the bowl structure in general.

“I think our coaches, administrators would tell you that the bowls are still incredibly important in the ecosystem and we should be trying to do things to make sure that that system is preserved around this expanded playoff,” Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said on Big Noon Conversations with FOX Sports’ Joel Klatt.

“It doesn’t mean it won’t be different. It doesn’t mean it might look slightly different. But at the end of the day there’s enough good football teams and enough interest where people still want to watch at that time of year, so I think those things will drive it.”

For years the importance of bowl games was readily apparent. For one, there were direct bowl payouts to schools that varied based on the prestige each bowl had in the pecking order.

That eventually consolidated toward conference-wide payouts based on collective bowl appearances, but there was still a clear pecking order to the bowls.

Bragging rights. Pride. Quality of destination for the game.

All of those were things that would keep college football players going hard throughout the season, looking for the best payout at the end of a long season.

Whether those continue in the new era of college football remains to be seen, but if the importance of bowl games is to remain in place, administrators and bowl officials alike better be willing to adjust on the fly.

“It has evolved a lot over the years, whether there are other conference tie-ins and how you create matchups around it and who survives going forward and how many,” Petitti said. “Time will tell all of that, but there’s real interest, I can tell you from the Big Ten’s perspective, to support that system as hard as we can and to make them successful because, look, it’s done by volunteers in these markets.

“It’s not an easy undertaking. People give of their time to provide opportunities to student-athletes. It’s a pretty remarkable thing what happens. You know, you’ve experienced it, when you see how much pride there is when you go to a game regardless of how big the game actually is in terms of its profile. It takes a lot of work and there’s a lot of dedicated people, so there’s great value in that and you’d hate to lose that.”

So stay tuned in 2024 and beyond as college football’s postseason grapples with the ongoing importance of bowl games and how they should best be set up going forward.