Scott Davis: Is there a fix for bowl games?

Scott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter year-round (the following is his most recent) and a column during football season that’s published on GamecockCentral.com. To receive Scott’s newsletter every Friday, sign up here.

May I humbly ask for the opportunity to become the 10 trillionth person to wonder what the future is for college football’s bowl games?

I’m guessing you have an opinion on this, too. We might as well weigh in, right? Everyone else has.

Perhaps lost in the wild furor of Bielema v. Beamer – which took up the bulk of my column from South Carolina’s 21-17 loss to Illinois in the Citrus Bowl – was a nugget near the end in which I touched upon the ever-dwindling importance of the non-Playoff bowl games.

I wasn’t staking out any kind of bold, fresh claim here: Fans and analysts alike have been talking about the growing irrelevance of bowl season for at least a decade now. And certainly with the arrival of the College Football Playoff several years ago, bowls have begun to feel a little less necessary, a little more pointless, and at times, even a little strange.

Perhaps the nadir of the Bowl Era came a year ago, when Florida State – undefeated but still left out of the then-four-team Playoff – saw many of its key contributors opt out of an Orange Bowl appearance against Georgia along the way to a 63-3 shelling that the Seminole program has yet to recover from.

Perhaps the bottom had already fallen out before that.

But for me, with the inauguration of a 12-team Playoff and an offseason filled with news about the Transfer Portal and NIL payments, this was the year when it finally hit me in the face like a whack from a two-by-four. A lifelong college football fan who cherishes the game’s traditions and quirks and history, I found myself staring at this year’s slate of games with an odd feeling of emptiness.

I was no longer sure what I was watching.

I found myself wrestling with the same set of questions: Why were these games being played? Who were they being played for? What was the meaning? I wasn’t sure I had an answer.

At times, I couldn’t deny that it felt like I was watching an NFL Preseason contest whenever I flicked over to a bowl game: It was football, and I like football, so I was up for having it running in the background, but what was happening didn’t seem to be of any particular importance.

There are several reasons why I think I was feeling this way, and none of them look like they’ll be changing any time soon.

So what’s next for the sport we all love? What does the future look like for bowl games?

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The Sense of An Ending

More than anything across the many decades of college football’s history, bowl games have provided us with the sense of an ending to each college football season. They offered the final chapter, the peace that comes with closure.

When you saw the Rose Bowl and the Cotton Bowl and the Orange Bowl and the Sugar Bowl coming up on New Year’s Day, it helped you get your mind right: This was it. This was the end.

It felt like a gigantic party, with celebrations being held in locations across America – Miami! Pasadena! New Orleans! – and it offered a grand send-off to the season that just happened. With the dawn of the BCS Era, the individual games certainly began to seem less crucial, but there was still a deep meaning to hoisting a Rose Bowl trophy or a Sugar Bowl cup at the end of the year.

Even now, it still feels like bowl games should exist.

People still watch them, though they increasingly don’t turn out for them in person.

And had South Carolina’s dramatic, occasionally heart-stopping season simply ended with the team’s victory at Clemson, it would have felt like we’d been robbed of an opportunity to continue a ride we’d enjoyed for three months. It would have seemed like the curtain fell on a movie just as the final, crucial scene started.

We’d have been waiting for the sense of an ending to this unforgettable year, and it would have never arrived.

But what exactly was at stake in Orlando, after all?

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Searching for Meaning

This is the part where I’m about to sound like the oldest person alive.

I hate sounding like the oldest person alive. I hate feeling like the oldest person alive.

Still, it must be acknowledged: Now that 12 teams are included in the Playoff race for a national championship, it seems less and less clear to me what an individual bowl trophy means.

If you’re playing in a bowl game, you’d certainly rather win it than lose it. And for South Carolina, notching a 10th win in the Citrus Bowl would indeed have given Shane Beamer’s program some extra juice – double-digit-victory seasons still appear to matter in college football. So, the 10-win mantle was at stake, and most of us believe 10 means at least a little something (and it certainly does at South Carolina).

For those reasons and many others, I was disappointed that South Carolina didn’t claim a Citrus Bowl title.

But I didn’t feel devastated, at least not in the way that I would have anticipated.

I felt devastated as a child when South Carolina lost the 1984 Gator Bowl. I felt devastated again when they lost the 1987 Gator Bowl. Neither of those games were for national championships, but they felt profoundly important, and not just to me – 60,000 South Carolina fans bought tickets to the ’84 Gator Bowl.

In that bygone world where we were all just guessing at who the nation’s best team was at the end of the year, winning a major bowl game felt like a mini-championship of sorts.

And yes, I was a kid then, and kids care about sports in a way that’s a little weird, maybe even a little creepy, and Gator Bowl titles haven’t mattered much for a very long time now. But it’s hard to deny that playing in bowl games in the current environment is starting to feel like playing in the NIT in basketball – it’s definitely something you can do, and the extra practice time’s good, and you’d rather win than lose if you’re going to be there.

But nothing really seems to be at stake.

It’s clear that many of the players currently making up college rosters agree. They’re opting out of these games with increasing regularity if there’s even a chance they’ll go somewhere in the upcoming NFL Draft, and nothing suggests this practice will be going away – if anything, we should expect it to intensify.

As for the games, they’ll likely drift onward, zombie-like, into the future, thanks to television and the power of tradition.

We’ll probably still be watching, too.

But we may no longer be sure why.

Tell me how you’d fix bowl games – or if you think they can be fixed – by writing me at [email protected].

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