Fix The Bowl System, Have A Draft

This is becoming an annual Rant come Bowl Season as I continue to feed ESPN ideas on how to #MakeBowlSeasonGreatAgain.  My format is simple, conference tie-ins to bowls suck and everyone loves drafts.  Basically, because the playoff and the NY6 Bowls eat up so many of the great teams, the other matchups leave a lot to be desired.  Then throw in all the bowl tie-ins with each conference and all the different rules each of those conferences have in their selection process and we seem to always miss on the great common-sense matchups and instead get a bunch of BLAH.  I have fixed all that.

A BOWL DRAFT!!!  Instead of the 4-hour show that ESPN aired today unveiling all the bowl games, we have a live draft.

The rules are simple. The draft order goes by the bowl payouts from the previous bowl season.  You want the best teams, you payout the most money.  Every year bowl payout bids are sealed until AFTER the bowl games are announced.  The payout figure is then used for the next year to determine the draft order. This would make it that no bowls would have an advantage over others.  It would also allow a bowl to make a play for a big game with better opponents if they were willing to pay a premium.  This also could drive up the payouts in bowls, which will make university presidents and athletic directors very happy.

Here is the Draft Order based on the 2018 Bowl Season payouts: (Note: All New Year’s 6 Bowls are protected in the Top 6 spots, but conference affiliation is no longer a part of the bowl selection process)

CFB Playoff Sites:

1. Peach Bowl

2. Fiesta Bowl

Remaining New Year’s 6 Bowls (in a rotating order):

3. Rose Bowl

4. Orange Bowl

5. Cotton Bowl

6. Sugar Bowl

All Other Bowls:

7. Citrus Bowl ($8,550,000)

8. Alamo Bowl ($7,975,000)

9. Outback Bowl ($6,350,000)

10. Holiday Bowl ($6,326,258)

11. Texas Bowl ($6,300,000)

12. Camping World Bowl ($5,800,000)

13. Music City Bowl ($5,650,000)

14. Belk Bowl ($4,505,556)

15. Pinstripe Bowl ($4,300,000)

16. Liberty Bowl ($4,294,681)

17. RedBox Bowl ($3,600,000)

18. Sun Bowl ($3,447,568)

19. TaxSlayer Bowl ($3,168,292)

20. Las Vegas ($2,760,000)

21. Military Bowl ($2,066,990)

22. ServPro First Responders Bowl ($1,667,000)

23. Birmingham Bowl ($1,650,000)

24. Lending Tree Bowl ($1,500,000)

25. Independence Bowl ($1,248,280)

26. Gasparilla Bowl ($1,133,735)

27. New Mexico Bowl ($1,050,000)

28. Cheez-It Bowl ($1,037,118)

29. Hawaii Bowl ($1,000,000)

30. Boca Raton Bowl ($1,000,000)

31. Idaho Potato Bowl ($950,000)

32. New Orleans Bowl ($925,000)

33. Armed Forces Bowl ($900,000)

34. Cure Bowl ($751,115)

35. Quick Lane Bowl ($750,000)

36. Frisco Bowl ($750,000)

37. Arizona Bowl ($412,920)

38. Camellia Bowl ($250,000)

39. Bahamas Bowl ($225,000)

THE DRAFT:

The Draft would be simple, there is no conference affiliation, no automatic bids and no side table negotiations, just each bowl picking their teams, with a just a few rules.

*Bowls will select in order with a pool of 10 teams to choose from.  For instance, the Rose Bowl would have the 1st choice after the CFB Playoff Committee selects the top 4 playoff teams.  The Rose Bowl would then have the next 10 teams in the rankings available to pick from.  This means that the CFP Committee would have to rank all bowl eligible teams (79 this season).  For this exercise I am using the CBS Top 130 Rankings from their website.  With each bowl selections, two more teams come available for the next bowl to choose from.

*No team can drop more than six bowl games.  Meaning that once you show up in the selection pool, if you are not picked by the 1st five bowls you were made available to, you are automatically assigned to the next bowl.

There is no chance that ESPN couldn’t and wouldn’t sell the hell out of this.  Can you imagine a 4-hour show unveiling the 4 Playoff teams, plus a live draft for the remaining bowls?  They could have a greenroom with 79 different coaches/AD’s from all the bowl eligible schools and a “War Room” like the NFL Draft of all the bowl committees.  Every 5 minutes a new bowl representative comes on stage to make their pick followed by team reps coming out on stage for a quick photo op.  Then back to the set and that bowl gets the attention of Rece Davis, Desmond Howard, David Pollack and Kirk Herbstreit for the next 5 minutes while waiting on the next selection.  Let’s not forget about the rankings continuously being unveiled with two more eligible teams for the next bowl to select from.  It would be College Football’s version of the Royal Rumble as everyone waits to see who is next!  Think about it, every bowl gets their individual time in the national spotlight, the coaches get some face time and the network gets millions of eyeballs, EVERYBODY WINS!

Another benefit from this format is avoid the repetition we see every bowl season with the same schools going back to the same bowls due to conference affiliations.  The current format has teams limited to only a few locations based on their conference tie-ins.  Bowl attendance has been way down recently, and you’d have to imagine it has to do with fans not wanting to go back to the same location every few years.  This format would make any bowl a possibility for any team and give the bowl the decision to not pick the same teams they have had in recent years.

So, without further ado…

THE 2019 SELECTIONS: (My Mock Fake Bowl Draft)

ROSE BOWL – #6 Oregon vs #8 Wisconsin

ORANGE BOWL - #5 Georgia vs #10 Penn State

FIESTA BOWL - #9 Florida vs #11 Utah

COTTON BOWL - ##7 Baylor vs #13 Alabama

CITRUS BOWL - #12 Auburn vs #15 Notre Dame

ALAMO BOWL - #14 Michigan (Mandatory Pick) vs #22 USC

OUTBACK BOWL - #16 Iowa (Mandatory Pick) vs #23 Navy

HOLIDAY BOWL - #17 Memphis (Mandatory Pick) vs #18 Minnesota (Mandatory Pick)

TEXAS BOWL - #19 Boise State (Mandatory Pick) vs #20 Appalachian State (Mandatory Pick)

CAMPING WORLD BOWL - #21 Cincinnati (Mandatory Pick) vs #31 Texas A&M

MUSIC CITY BOWL - #24 Virginia (Mandatory Pick) vs #25 Oklahoma State

BELK BOWL - #26 Kansas State (Mandatory Pick) vs #30 Indiana

PINSTRIPE BOWL - #27 Air Force (Mandatory Pick) vs #28 SMU (Mandatory Pick)

LIBERTY BOWL - #29 Central Florida (Mandatory Pick) vs #37 Texas

RED BOX BOWL - #32 UL-Lafayette (Mandatory Pick) vs #33 Washington

SUN BOWL - #34 Iowa State (Mandatory Pick ) vs #35 Virginia Tech

TAXSLAYER BOWL - #36 Florida Atlantic (Mandatory Pick) vs #41 Tennessee

LAS VEGAS BOWL - #38 Wake Forest (Mandatory Pick) vs #42 Arizona State

MILITARY BOWL - #39 San Diego State (Mandatory Pick) vs #40 Temple (Mandatory Pick)

SERVPRO FIRST RESPONDERS BOWL - #43 Kentucky vs #52 BYU

BIRMINGHAM BOWL - #44 Louisville (Mandatory Pick) vs #46 UAB

LENDING TREE BOWL - #45 Louisiana Tech (Mandatory Pick) vs #53 North Carolina

INDEPENDENCE BOWL - #47 Marshall (Mandatory Pick) vs #57 Florida State

GASPARILLA BOWL - #48 Western Kentucky (Mandatory Pick) vs #59 Illinois

NEW MEXICO BOWL - #49 Cal (Mandatory Pick) vs #50 Hawaii (Mandatory Pick)

CHEEZ-ITS BOWL - #51 Pitt (Mandatory Pick) vs #63 Michigan State

HAWAII BOWL - #54 Utah State (Mandatory Pick) vs #61 Washingtoni State

BOCA RATON BOWL - #55 Tulane (Mandatory Pick) vs #56 Central Michigan (Mandatory Pick)

IDAHO POTATO BOWL - #58 Wyoming (Mandatory Pick) vs #62 Mississippi State

NEW ORLEANS BOWL - #60 Georgia Southern (Mandatory Pick) vs #66 Miami (FL)

ARMED FORCES BOWL - #64 Boston College vs #70 Arkansas State

CURE BOWL - #67 Georgia State vs #71 Western Michigan

QUICK LANE BOWL - #65 Southern Miss (Mandatory Pick)  vs #72 Miami (OH)

FRISCO BOWL - #68 Charlotte (Mandatory Pick) vs #69 Buffalo

ARIZONA BOWL – #73 Nevada vs #75 Ohio

CAMELLIA BOWL - #74 Liberty vs #76 Toledo

BAHAMAS BOWL - #78 Eastern Michigan vs #79 Florida International

Change is good.

Change is needed.

The Sports Fix: College Football, Part 2 of 2

PART 2: THE BOWL SYSTEM

You have already seen my idea for re-alignment for Division 1 college sports, now it is time for me to fix the broken post-season that we have in College Football.  Let me first say that I didn’t mind the BCS.  I didn’t like some of the factors that went into the computers that spit out the match-ups, but most years, they did get it right.  To me it doesn’t matter if you have the BCS with 2 teams, or a playoff with 4, 8, 12 or 16 teams, those games will always be exciting have people watching.  It is the bowl system that needs fixed. So how do we fix it you ask?

A Bowl Draft.

Let’s be honest, who doesn’t like a draft?  Well it can work for college football and the bowl system too. 

Hear me out now. I think we all realize that despite being entertaining, the post-season in college football right now consists of 3 important games, the two semifinals and the national championship game.  Then they also give us 37 absolutely meaningless games.  With my 12-team playoff (See Sports Fix College Football Part 1) that becomes 11 meaningful games.  However, you still have the meaningless bowl games.  The 1^st thing that I would do is cut down the number of bowl games.  If we cut that number down to 30 (still too many in my mind) it still gives the networks and fans just about the same amount of games we currently have in the post-season, but gets rid of the low-level bowls that nobody watches or cares about.

With 12 teams going to the playoff and 30 bowls, we need to have 72 teams eligible for post-season play out of the 130 FBS teams.  Right now, 78 of 128 get into the post-season. As you can see it really only eliminates 6 teams from the postseason every year, and to be honest, they probably didn’t deserve a spot anyway if they were in that bottom 6.

I would then have the College Football Playoff Committee rank all bowl eligible teams, not just the Top 25.  After that we would use those rankings to pair up the teams for each bowl.  The catch is, we allow each bowl to draft their ideal match-ups.  So here is how it would work.

THE BASICS:

1) The College Football Playoff Sites are obviously protected games and will select their teams before the draft starts.

2) Using bowl payouts, we create our draft order. 2 of the current “New Year’s 6 Bowls” would be used as semifinal sites for the playoff, so only 4 of them would be in the draft each year.  Those remaining 4 bowls would always have the top 4 draft spots, on a rotating cycle.  Those games would also always be played on New Year’s Day (unless it fell on a Sunday, then they would be played either New Year’s Eve or January 2^nd).  After that, the Citrus bowl is the bowl with the highest payout, therefore they have the 5^th selection.  We continue this order through all the bowl games.  Based on the 2016 bowl season and payouts, this year the draft order would look like this:

1. Rose Bowl

2. Sugar Bowl

3. Orange Bowl

4. Cotton Bowl

5. Citrus Bowl ($8.5M)

6. Alamo Bowl ($7.65M)

7. Outback Bowl ($7M)

8. Cactus Bowl ($6.65M)

9. Texas Bowl ($6M)

10. Holiday Bowl ($5.65M)

11. Music City Bowl ($5.5M)

12. Tax Slayer Bowl ($5. 5M)

13. Russell Athletic Bowl ($4.55M)

14. Foster Farms Bowl ($4.425M)

15. Sun Bowl ($4.3M)

16. Pinstripe Bowl ($4M)

17. Belk Bowl ($3.4M)

18. Liberty Bowl ($2.875M)

19. Las Vegas Bowl ($2.7M)

20. Cure Bowl ($2.7M)

21. Independence Bowl ($2.4M)

22. Quick Lane Bowl ($2.4M)

23. Zaxby’s Heart of Dallas Bowl ($2.2M)

24. Miami Beach Bowl ($2M)

25. Military Bowl ($2M)

26. Birmingham Bowl ($2M)

27. Dollar General Bowl ($1.5M)

28. Armed Forces Bowl ($1.35M)

29. Hawaii Bowl ($1.3M)

30. Poinsettia Bowl ($1.225M)

31. St. Petersburg ($1.075M)

32. New Orleans Bowl ($1M)

33. New Mexico Bowl ($912,500)

34. Bahamas Bowl ($900,000)

35. Boca Raton Bowl ($800,000)

36. Famous Idaho Potato Bowl ($650,000)

37. Arizona Bowl (TBA)

REMINDER, we would only be using 30 bowls, so 7 of these bowls would be eliminated. This is what the bowl payouts are for this year, just to give you an idea of what each bowl is working with right now.

THE DRAFT:

The way the draft would work is simple. There would be absolutely no conference affiliations with any bowls. There would be no automatic bids for any conference. As mentioned before, 12 teams would automatically be placed in the playoff.  After that, it is a free for all, minus a few simple rules.

* Bowls will select in order, with a pool of 10 teams to pick. For instance, this year with the 1^st pick, the Rose Bowl would be able to pick any 2 teams that finished 13-22 in the final committee rankings. (Remember the #1-12 are off the board and in the playoff.)  Next pick would be the Sugar Bowl and 2 more teams would open up for their selection, teams #23-24. And so on and so forth, until all the bowls are filled.

* No team can drop more than 5 bowl games. Meaning every team must be selected within five games of becoming available. This rewards teams for successful seasons despite how unattractive they might be as a bowl team. It would also prevent teams with great history and huge fan bases being selected to bowls they don’t deserve.

Think about what this type of format would do for the college football post-season.

First, ESPN could/would sell the hell out of the live draft. They did a 4-hour show on the unveiling of the 4 Playoff teams on Sunday, can you imagine what they would able to do if they also had a Bowl Draft immediately after their playoff unveil?  Imagine a greenroom with 72 different head coaches and AD’s, to go along with a “war room” for the bowls and the committee members.  Each bowl representative comes on stage to make their pick, followed by the coaches and AD’s from each school come on stage, shake hands, have a quick photo-op.  Rece Davis, David Pollack, Desmond Howard and Kirk Herbstreit then talk about that bowl, give some story lines and talk about each team in the game for a few minutes, maybe even interview the coach or AD from the schools. Then while all that is happening, 2 more bowl teams are unveiled, which means 2 more fan bases are not pulled in to the intrigue of the broadcast.  Everybody wins. The schools get some press, the bowls gets their individual time in the national spotlight, the coaches get a little face time and the network gets millions of eyeballs on their broadcast.

Another benefit to this system is you don’t have repetition. Bowl attendances have been way down the past few years and a big reason is fans don’t want to go back to the same bowls every few years.  With the current conference tie-ins teams are limited to a very small group of potential bowl sites. So even if you go to a different bowl every year within your conference affiliation, after about 8 years you are repeating your bowl site.  This way you have the potential of 30 different sites, not 8 or 9.

This format also helps other conferences get a chance to play each other. For instance, the Big Ten has nine bowl affiliations this year, none of which includes the Big XII.  The same goes for the PAC 12 and SEC.  With all of their bowls, they never have it set that those 2 prestigious conferences play each other in bowl games.  It could also give teams from the AAC, C-USA, MAC and MWC a chance to play a Power 5 conference team.  Most of those conferences have affiliations with each other and don’t get a chance to face a Power 5 team in bowl season.

THE MONEY:

First things first, a 12-team playoff will bring in more television revenue than the current 37 meaningless bowls do COMBINED!  People might complain that this is taking money away from teams/conferences since the bowl contracts with conferences all but guarantee a certain amount of money that every conference knows that they will receive come bowl season. I disagree. In this system, the bowl payouts would go up, which would create a larger pot for the teams and conference.  The reason the payouts would go up is because the more a bowl is willing to pay the better draft pick that bowl has to pick the best match-up possible.  If you want to get better teams to your bowl game, you up your payout.

Payouts would have to be submitted before the season starts in a blind bid, the draft order would then be announced closer to the end of the season. If the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl wanted to make a splash next year to celebrate the 20th year of the bowl, they could make a larger bid than they might normally, and get a match-up between top 15-20 teams instead of teams between 50-60.

One last detail I would change is the bowl payouts. Instead of each team splitting the pot and putting on an exhibition for the fans, I would have the result of the game determine the payout. Winning team takes two-thirds and the losing team gets one-third.  Make the games matter.

I know that this does not fix all the problems in the college football post-season, but I think it does make bowl season better. I know as a fan of college football I get sick of the same match-ups in all the big games.  The chances of playing in the Cotton Bowl or Rose Bowl are currently non-existent if you are an ACC team.  The only bowl a PAC12 team can get on or around New Year’s Day is now the Rose Bowl.  The Outback Bowl, Citrus Bowl and Tax Slayer Bowl are games for only the Big Ten, ACC and SEC, sorry PAC12 and Big XII.  This should not be the case and it wouldn’t be under this new system.

Change is good.

Change is needed.

If you missed The Sports Fix: College Football Part 1, check it out HERE!