Pac-12 breakup will have major impact on bowl season

With the Pac-12 being dealt two fatal blows by the Big Ten and Big 12, you better believe the dying league’s bowl-game tie-ins have been greatly compromised as a result.

While an expanded College Football Playoff will remove the Big Ten/Pac-12 tie-in to the Rose Bowl in 2024, the dying league’s other bowl games will be greatly affected as well.

Brett McMurphy of The Action Network reported “All five bowls with Pac-12 tie-ins have begun discussions with other conferences about changing to a different conference affiliation for the 2024 and 2025 seasons.” The five bowls McMurphy is referring to are the Alamo, Las Vegas, Holiday, Sun and Los Angeles bowls. Many of these games have long had West Coast tie-ins.

These tie-ins were slated to be in effect through the 2025 college season, but that is changing.

The Pac-12’s demise means the end of several conference bowl game tie-ins

While the bowl system will be largely marginalized with the expanded playoff, it will always be a great thing to allow the student-athletes to be rewarded with opportunities from a great season to travel and play in interesting venues. Although the Alamo and Holiday Bowls are just outside of the New Year’s Six games, these bowls are some of the best out there of the middle-tier variety.

I think what is going to happen is conference tie-ins might become a thing of the past in this latest wave of realignment. Yes, we are still going to absolutely reward lesser Power Five and all the Group of Five programs who ended up having great seasons for their standard, but we may see tie-ins be Group of Five West vs. Power Five East instead of Mountain West vs. ACC, or something.

Ultimately, this is just the latest example of what happens when unprecedented conference realignment occurs. The day and age of five Power Five leagues and five Group of Five leagues are cooked. Surely enough, there will be a new label to attach to the differing levels of major college football: The haves and have-nots, sadly. Either way, at least we still have the bowl game system.

I would expect for these bowl games to still have somewhat regional tie-ins at the end of the day.