Quick. Name a 2025 bowl game that’s not on the playoff slate. Rose, Sugar, Peach, Fiesta, Cotton, Orange … the playoffs have co-opted all of them. What’s left is a collection of half-remembered holdover monikers, who’s-watching-this curiosities and sponsor mismatches … with one notable exception:
The Pop-Tarts Bowl. Yes, the one where they sacrifice the mascot to be devoured by the winning team.
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In just two years, the Pop-Tarts Bowl has done what the Cheez-It Citrus, TaxSlayer Gator and Servpro First Responders bowls haven’t been able to in the CFP era: get eyeballs. And all it took was this:
And this:
And, uh, this:
I would give the NIL budget of Texas Tech toward the creation of a time machine to bring Bear Bryant and Woody Hayes forward to 2025 … not to get their perspective on the playoff and the portal, but to ask them what they think of college football embracing something called “Mouth Heaven.”
Look, you can’t blame the Pop-Tarts Bowl (Georgia Tech vs. BYU) — or the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl Presented by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop (Miami of Ohio vs. Fresno State), or the Bucked Up LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk (Boise State vs. Washington), or the other wacky bowls — for going with a Don’t Go Big, Go Weird angle. With the playoffs vacuuming up all the oxygen in the college football universe, why not get strange?
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I mean, who needs a fundamentally sound display of competitive postseason sportsmanship when you can dump mayo on a coach’s head?
The Duke’s Mayo Bowl (Wake Forest vs. Mississippi State) began the mayo slop in its second year after relentless online bullying from the college football sicko (not an insult) community. That’s a fast route to social media virality right there. (The Bush’s Boca Raton Bowl of Beans — Toledo vs. Louisville — has said it will not dump beans on a coach’s head. Give it time, give it time.)
The schism that’s happening in the bowl universe between the Big Dogs and the masses mirrors what’s happening in college football at large. In the playoff era, only a few teams matter, and the rest are left fighting for whatever remaining scraps they can grab. For younger, college-age fans, this is standard and normal, but for anyone over the age of 30 raised on a stream of holiday-week Sun Bowls and Liberty Bowls, there’s a sense that a traditional element of college football is fading fast.
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None of this is meant to mourn the loss in prestige of the Bowl Industrial Complex. The bowls and their executives raked in armloads of revenue every year with their combination of broadcast rights, sponsorship agreements and mandatory ticket blocks while at the same time doing all they could to protect their own fiefdoms and stalling any progress toward a meaningful playoff system. The bowls served first and foremost to enrich and perpetuate themselves, so there’s no small irony in the fact that they’re now outmuscled and frozen out by another self-interested fountain-of-revenue entity — the College Football Playoff.
For more than a century, the bowls have served as a pleasant coda to college football season, an opportunity to get one more look at your team, hear one more rendition of the fight song, to carry you through the cold winter and the long offseason. But the canaries are chirping all over this particular coal mine. Notre Dame took its ball and went home after airing grievances for several days. Iowa State and Kansas State opted out of their bowls this year, incurring $500,000 fines from the Big 12 in the process. Multiple 5-7 teams declined to play Georgia State in the Birmingham Bowl — not because the Panthers are a fearsome opponent, but because they’d already dispersed and the “prestige” of a bowl wasn’t enough to lure them back.
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So what’s the end game for the bowl infrastructure? Gimmicks are a short-term strategy, not a long-term replicable foundation. Some pundits have aired the idea of moving the bowls to the start of the season, which has merit as a nationwide “kickoff classic” festival. A start-of-the-year bowl season would also bring the 12 playoff teams, the bowl opt-out teams, the couldn’t-get-to-six-wins underachievers, and the gold-domed tantrum-thrower back into the mix for possible bowl selection. (Coaches tend to like playing in bowls because it gives them an extra month to practice with their team, but a simple NCAA calendar adjustment could address that.)
The sad truth is that in the playoff era, the bowls are a relic on a long slide to irrelevance, and the college football powers-that-be have little incentive to stop that slide. They’ll continue to exist, yes — bowls remain a lucrative low-lift endeavor for broadcasters, most notably ESPN — but their days as arbiters of college football history are done.
But hey, at least we’ll have stripping Pop-Tarts. That’s something, right? Right … ?
