I am a huge bowl fan. I do think there are about 5-10 too many. My attitude has always been if no one is left home, then it is really not all that special. If I was the NCAA Dictator for a day I would incorporate the following bowl changes.

1. Eliminate the mandate for Two Bowl Tie-ins.
2. If a bowl chooses two tie-ins both teams must have winning records to play each other. Failure for either team moves the spots to at-large. Major bowl rule.
3. A bowl may have a one tie-in and the Conference Tie-In team requires 6 wins.
4. At-Large must be placed in a bowl two spots ahead of team. IE: A 7 win team may not be taken over an 9 win team. A 7 win team may be taken over a 8 win team.
5. 6 win at-large are placed last. At-Large G5 winning team not being bypassed for a 6 win P5 team at-large.
6. Bowl Moratorium extended to 2026. No new bowls but existing bowls may move to cities or be bought by a city. IE: If a city wanted the Holiday bowl, they could buy it but it must keep the existing contract tie-ins and name. IE: Poinsettia could move to Chicago

Example of how Primary tie-in could look.

AAC 3 Primary Tie-Ins
Cure
Miami Beach
New Orleans

ACC 6 Primary Tie-Ins
Belk
Military
Orange
Russell Athletic
St. Petersburg
Taxslayer 

B10 5 Primary Tie-ins
Citrus 
Outback
Pinstripe
Quick Lane
Rose

B12 4 Primary Tie-ins
Alamo
Armed Forces
Heart of Dallas
Texas

CUSA 2 Primary Tie-ins
Boca Raton
Cactus

MAC 2 Primary Tie-ins
Bahamas
Potato 

MWC 2 Primary Tie-ins
Hawaii
New Mexico 

PAC 5 Primary Tie-ins
Sun
Arizona
Foster Farms
Holiday
Las Vegas

SBC 2 Primary Tie-ins
Camellia
Dollar General

SEC 5 Primary Tie-ins
Birmingham
Independence 
Liberty
Music City
Sugar


Fire away

I don't think I'd change anything. The pairings over the past few years have been very good at matching teams of comparable strength, and they have done a good job of giving geography an appropriate amount of weight. One could make a lot of changes and still not wind up with a result that made more people happy.

Let the market decide this.

Easy solution, in my opinion: cut back on the number of "Bowl" games (maybe 10) and reserve them for really good matchups of top teams. Could completely fold it into the CFP, too.


Then let every P5 team schedule a post-season exhibition game, if it so chooses. Don't have to, but every one could, if it wanted to. Those could only be on-campus (or normal game stadium) games, no neutral sites. And they aren't bowl games, just exhibition games.

The top rank FCS school gets an access spot in a bowl game. Last year would have been North Dakota State.

Nothing. The market place drives it. Power conferences have tie-ins due to traditions and fan base preferences, which equals better attendance and stability for the Bowls. We have 38 games because ESPN has a lot of programming hours and days to fill after December 10th (I think ESPN had something like 30 Bowls on their channels, CBS, FOX, ABC, NBC each had one, the last four had some rinky dink deal, might have shown up on your COMCAST or COX or whatever channel). The TV has money for 34-35 and a few try to break into that as you can see.

Picking four will always be difficult. It's hard to get it perfect. It is what it is. But you can't say there is any real controversy about who held the National Championship trophy. They have been legit.

It isn't broken. What is broken are Conference Championships. They are completely meaningless. The ACC and SEC were mismatches and the B1G and Pac-12 didn't matter for selection. The NC has made CCGs unimportant.

I agree but don't restrict it to bowls at pre-determined sites with pre-determined opponents. Allow teams to schedule exhibition games. The only reason some of these bowls exist is because they were created for a specific team or conference, so it's better not having them exist unless necessary.

I would scale the number of bowls to 24.

then have a rule that a conference can never send more than 50% of its teams to a bowl in a year. independents must team up with a conference like Notre Dame does. So each conference would be limited to the following number regardless of their record.

ACC+ND - 7 team limit
BigTen, SEC, CUSA - 7 team limit
MWC + BYU + NMSU - 7 team limit
MAC + Umass + Army - 7 team limit
PAC-12, AAC, SBC - 6 team limit
Big 12 - 5 team limit

That adds up to maximum of 65 teams available.

Make bowl games into tournaments. Example, The Cotton bowl would be a 4 team tournament. SEC west team, Big 12 team, MWC team, and CUSA champion.

Allow FCS teams to choose to play up in a bowl or play in their playoff .
Instead of allowing 5-7 teams if the top FCS turn it down then 5-7 teams can fill the slot.
This past year NDSU would have had to make a decision .
NDSU vs Army or North Texas vs Army not much difference competition wise.
This would create interest in a few lower tier bowls .
Instead of the complaining about a losing team playing you have a David vs Goliath type of story.

The first thing would be to expand the play-offs to 16 teams. The champions of The PAC, Big 12, Big Ten, American, Atlantic Coast Conference, Southeastern, Mid-American, Conference USA, and Sun Belt joined by the next 7 best teams (or Notre Dame and the best 6)

The first round of the play-offs would be the top 8 teams hosting teams 9 - 16. After the first round the remaining 8 teams would be re-seeded and assigned to The Rose Bowl, The Fiesta Bowl, The Sugar Bowl and The Orange Bowl.

The remaining bowls would be free to negotiate with the remaining teams in college football. This would hopefully result in bowl games of interest.

Nothing. Bowls shouldn't be forced to associate with conferences they don't feel it is in their best interest to associate with.