On the heels of a season in which there weren’t enough eligible teams to fill 80 bowl slots, the NCAA has taken a step to restore a bit of sanity to college football’s postseason, banning the creation of new bowl games for three years until after the 2019 season.
According to ESPN’s Brett McMurphy, who broke the news Monday, three cities were seeking NCAA certification for new bowl games this season: Austin, as well as Myrtle Beach and Charleston, S.C. McMurphy added that the NCAA’s Division I Council, which issued the ban, “plans to determine whether the minimum requirement of a ‘deserving’ bowl team is a winning record or finishing .500, a source said.”
Three 5-7 teams — Minnesota, Nebraska and San Jose State — made bowl games last season, though all three ended up winning. Plus, the Arizona Bowl was forced to invite two teams from the Mountain West — Nevada and Colorado State — causing MWC Commissioner Craig Thompson to call the bowl system “broken.”
“Having 5-7 teams and teams in the same conference playing bowl games kind of skewers the attempt for bowls to reward successful teams,” Tommy McQueeney, chairman of Charleston’s planned Medal of Honor Bowl, told Jon Solomon of CBSSports.com. “For that reason, just as an individual, I feel the NCAA has done a commendable job of trying to move this forward to something that makes much more sense for their commissioners and their conferences. Having said that, we’re the ones probably most disappointed by the decision because we feel like we’re well overdue.”
The state of South Carolina was only recently allowed to host bowl games and other predetermined NCAA championship events after removing the Confederate flag from its State House grounds.
As Solomon points out, 2019 was chosen as the ban’s endpoint for a reason: Many bowl-game contracts between conferences and the cities or TV networks that own the bowls expire at that time. One would think that many of the lesser bowls would disappear if the NCAA ruled that teams need to have winning records — not merely .500 records — to make a bowl game.
