Corey Clark: Florida State helped prove bowl system is clearly broken, but can it be saved?

MIAMI GARDENS — What happened here in the Orange Bowl on Saturday wasn’t a football game.

It was a tipping point.

For about seven or eight years now, as first-round picks, then early round picks, then even guys who thought they might get picked, started opting out of bowl games we have been heading down this road.

And the 2023 Florida State Seminoles might have just sent the world of college football past the point of no return.

You remember the play (if you were still sober and watching) in the first half on Saturday when Ja’Khi Douglas started jumping up and waving his arms in the end zone after Brock Glenn threw to some grass behind him?

That’s what this Orange Bowl did to the entire sport of college football.

“Guys, guys, guys! Look at me! Look at this!”

*ALSO SEE: Orange Bowl game was a joke, but 2023 was a special season for Florida State

Georgia head coach Kirby Smart said as much after the game.

“Let me say something, and maybe I’m wrong here and maybe this will be a bad soundbyte, but people need to see what happened tonight and they need to fix this,” Smart said. “It needs to be fixed. It’s very unfortunate that [FSU], who has a good football team and a good football program, are in the position they’re in.

“Everybody can say it’s their fault and it’s their own problem, all right, and everybody can say we had our guys and they didn’t have our guys. I can listen to all that.

“But college football has got to decide what they want, and I know things are changing. I know things are going to change next year. You know what, there’s going to still be bowl games outside of those (playoff games). People 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 in that game that didn’t have their full arsenal, and it affected the game 100 percent.”

Amen to all of that.

There’s no going back. No genie is going to hop back into a bottle if something doesn’t change drastically with the bowl system.

There will be 12 teams in the playoff next year. Great.

There will still be 40 other bowls.

What will that even look like?

Over the last decade, players have realized that unless they’re playing for a championship, there’s a whole lot more to lose than gain in a bowl game.

You can call that selfish. Sure. You can call it smart, too. Logical. It’s all about perspective, I guess.

Mike Norvell opted out of his last bowl game at Memphis. That team, his team, had won the conference and earned a trip to the Cotton Bowl! The biggest game in the history of the school, I have to imagine. A great moment for that program and those kids.

And he wasn’t there for it.

He had already opted out for more money and a better job at Florida State.

I don’t fault him for that by the way. Not one bit.

Just like I don’t fault Johnny Wilson and Jared Verse either. Sometimes people look out for their own best interests. It has absolutely nothing to do with “culture.”

College football players have never had more power than they do right now. Not even close. And they’re using it.

Norvell didn’t stick around for the Cotton Bowl, but Keon Coleman and Trey Benson and Braden Fiske (all of whom have been dealing with undisclosed injuries all season) should have stuck around for an Orange Bowl game that was an affront to what they had accomplished this season?

Norvell pointed out after the game, when talking about opt-outs, that no other team in the history of the sport had gone through what the Seminoles did this month. That’s true. It was very unique. They were robbed out of a chance, through no fault of their own, to play for a national championship.

Why, then, would some of these players risk their NFL futures to go play for the system that just spat (you can change that “p” to an “h” and it still fits!) all over them earlier in the month?

Norvell also intimated that if FSU had lost to Louisville in the conference championship game (like UGA did to Alabama) that he thinks many of those same players would have actually played in the Orange Bowl.

I don’t know if that’s true or not.

I do know the bowl system is forever wrecked. At least this current, outdated model.

I know Florida State got a lot of attention for that abomination on Saturday, but the last two Heisman winners opted out of their bowl games, too. Every bowl played after Christmas had multiple starters opting to NOT play. Half the games on TV are featuring kids making their first or second start at quarterback. Kids who have never played in a real college game.

Yet, we keep acting as if these are real college games.

They aren’t. Not anymore.

The playoffs are. Those count. And as the playoffs expand, that will keep eight more teams fully intact. That’s a positive.

But unless something changes, the other bowls will continue to become shell games. As in, a shell of one team plays a shell of another team.

“I think the bigger the playoff gets, the more it minimizes bowl games,” Alabama head coach Nick Saban said on Saturday. “One of the great traditions of college football for many years was if you had a great season, you got to go to a bowl game. It’s great for the players. They got a lot of positive reinforcement. Maybe you didn’t win a championship, but you had a good team. It was great for the fan base.

“As soon as we started having playoffs, this is new and I’m not complaining about that, it started to minimize the importance of bowl games. The more we expand the playoffs, which I’m not against, I’m for, it minimizes the importance of bowl games.”

Especially for the players.

So, while Florida State was hit by a perfect storm of catalysts (angry/heartbroken about being robbed by the committee, seeing star QB Jordan Travis break his leg in the middle of the field, players with real NFL futures not wanting to risk millions), it certainly doesn’t mean the Seminoles were the only bowl team in the country that wasn’t an accurate representation of who they really were.

Or did you not see that Ohio State game?

One last thing about the “culture” argument about FSU. Please, please, please keep in mind that many of the guys that didn’t play on Saturday had been battling each week, barely practicing, just to be ready to play in the games. All because they were chasing a common goal. And don’t forget that a good number of them RETURNED to school when they could have chased their NFL dreams a year earlier.

I think that speaks pretty highly of culture. Just my two cents.

Anyway, this has been a long column with no real answers to the actual problem. And I do think this is a problem. I’m a college football fan. I love the sport. What happened on Saturday was not good for the game. I understand the decisions. I do. But it was still gross. And completely uncompetitive.

But I don’t know what can be done to fix this.

Maybe figure out a way to change the calendar so the portal doesn’t open up until AFTER the bowls? But how can you do that with spring semesters starting in early January?

Maybe the bowls can figure out a way to incentivize the players to play? Give them money instead of bluetooth speakers and fleece jackets? Give the players a winning share? Like they do in professional sports — which college football essentially now is by the way.

Maybe the collectives can require in all these NIL contracts that the players would forfeit a portion if they choose to sit out a game when they’re healthy? But then how do you determine if someone is really healthy or not? And are you going to sue them? That’s not a great look. Then again neither is 63-3!

Maybe move the bowl games to the following preseason? I’ve seen that idea floated around, too. That way you would guarantee you’d be getting full teams. And with a 12-team playoff, it’s not like there’s a huge risk to playing Georgia to start the season. You can lose and still make it (insert sarcastic response here).

I just don’t know how it would work. Like logistically. The playoffs for 2024 are announced, and then the bowl matchups for August of 2025 are figured out? I think it might be cool, certainly better than the current model. But it also would be really weird to not have any college football games during the holidays.

So, yeah, I have no real answers. Nobody does.

But after what we’ve seen in recent seasons, and how it culminated on Saturday with the most uncompetitive bowl game in history, something absolutely has to be done.

Or we can forget about bowl games ever truly mattering again.

Contact senior writer Corey Clark at [email protected].

Talk about this story with other die-hard Florida State football fans on the Tribal Council.