New Year’s Day used to mean everything in college. Now it’s just an afterthought in the College Football Playoff era. Why can’t it be what it used to?
College football needs to fix their broken bowl system and it starts with making New Year’s Day the marquee day it used to be.
In an era where live sporting events are the primary drivers of television ratings, one would think certain sports would try to dominate marquee dates on the calendar. The NFL owns Thanksgiving, the NBA owns Christmas and the NCAA used to own New Year’s Day. But with the advent of the College Football Playoff, Jan. 1 doesn’t matter to the sport as much as it used to or frankly should.
Bowl season is well underway, with games being played as far back as Dec. 20. While it is fun to turn on the TV and see a bowl game just about every day these last few weeks, it’s a complete shame that New Year’s Day only has four games this year, none of which have anything to do with the College Football Playoff. Jan. 1 isn’t as big of a deal as Labor Day Weekend is now in the sport.
What happened? Why would college football give up its most sacred day of the year? Just about everybody is not working today and should be able to channel surf to find nearly a dozen high-quality bowl games, one coming on right after another. But in the 2019 NCAA season, all we have today are the Citrus Bowl, the Outback Bowl, the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl. What gives?
With the College Football Playoff coming into existence in 2014, it has completely changed the collegiate bowl system for the worse. Before the playoff, games like the Citrus Bowl and the Holiday Bowl used to matter. Now they don’t. Unless games like the Rose Bowl or the Sugar Bowl are national semifinal games of the playoff, they don’t really matter all that much either.
While the College Football Playoff still encompasses six marquee bowls in the Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Peach Bowl, the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl, the idea of them being the New Year’s Six hasn’t really caught on. Oftentimes, we have to remind people the two national semifinal games are going on days before the calendar flips. That just feels so wrong.
Though it makes sense for those two national semifinal games to be back-to-back standalone in their own window, not having them on New Year’s Day feels like we’re perpetually being cheated out of something really special. Frankly, all six New Year’s Six bowls should be played out on Jan. 1, but college football clearly wants to expand its season rather than compress it.
The complicating factors here are the Rose Bowl refuses to be played on any other day and Chick-fil-A probably won’t sponsor a high-profile bowl game if it’s played on a Sunday. Since the Rose Bowl is the “Granddaddy of Them All”, it draws huge ratings even if it’s not a playoff game because it normally features two non-Southeastern teams, thus yielding a wider audience to draw from.
Even though we’re totally cool with the national championship being played in primetime on a Monday in early January, many of us long for the New Year’s Day college football experience of yesteryear. The playoff has changed everything, for better or worse. While it’s great to have the four best teams with a shot at the title, New Year’s Day has suffered and so has bowl season.
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