What Are Bowl Games in College Football?

What do you say when you see a stadium packed with over 100,000 fans all wearing the same color and screaming in unison for a bunch of amateurs? Welcome to America! I’m referring, of course, to the obsession that is college football. The entire premise is a bit perplexing, and when it comes time to figuring out the national champion, the season devolves into these so-called bowl games. What are bowl games? I’ll try and explain.

 

Overview

As a reminder, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the most prominent governing body for college athletics in the US, overseeing something like 24 different sports. One such sport is football.

NCAA football is divided into three divisions, with the top division having two subdivisions—the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). When people think about the big-time college football alluded to above, they’re thinking about the FBS, and that’s what I’ll be referring to from here on out.

The FBS consists of about 131 teams (this number can change over time), most of which play in one of 10 conferences. A handful of teams are not in a conference and are considered independent. Schools typically play 12 games in a season, the majority being against members of their own conference. The result is a highly unbalanced schedule, meaning at the end of the year you’re stuck trying to compare teams that haven’t played each other—in fact, they haven’t even played common opponents. And that’s where the chaos begins.

 

Bowl Games

At the end of the regular season, a certain number of teams get to play an additional game called a bowl game. (Per Wikipedia, the term bowl originated from the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, California, which hosted the first such games in the early 1900s. The Rose Bowl took its name from the Yale Bowl, literally shaped like a bowl and the prototype for many football stadiums.)

There are 42 FBS bowl games (a number that is also subject to change), meaning that 84 teams get to participate. Six or more wins are required in order to be eligible for an invitation, unless there aren’t enough eligible teams based on this standard.

The matchups in these games are often predetermined by contracts between conferences and bowls. In other words, Bowl X may feature a team from Conference A versus a team from Conference B, and Bowl Y may feature a team from Conference C versus a team from Conference D. There is wiggle room built into these contracts, but you get the general idea.

The games are played at previously designated locations—all in the US aside from one in The Bahamas—that usually end up being neutral sites unless a school happens to be located nearby. Some stadiums host multiple bowl games (not on the same day). Given that we live in the era of naming rights deals, bowl games are notorious for some unconventional names—a couple that come to mind are the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl and the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.

What exactly do the winners of these games receive? In the case of 36 of the 42, the players get bragging rights (if anyone is watching), and the winning team’s conference gets a payout. The payout can range from a couple hundred thousand to several million dollars and is distributed among member schools—the exact amount is largely determined by the prestige of the game, which in turn determines the amount the bowl receives for broadcast rights. (The remaining six games are discussed below.)

Interestingly, while the bowls, conferences, and broadcasting entities seem to have made this operation financially worthwhile, the NCAA does not get a piece of the revenue.

 

The College Football Playoff

Since 2014, six games are eligible to double as national semifinal games, with two landing that honor each year on a rotational basis (and the other four simply providing exaggerated bragging rights until it’s their year to be a semifinal). These six games generate quite a bit of revenue, much of which is passed on to the conferences. Participating conferences get the lion’s share, though some is also reserved for conferences who do not have any representatives in the games.

And who gets to play in the two semifinals? A 13-member committee selects and seeds four lucky schools.

The winners of the semifinal games then face off in what is called the College Football Playoff National Championship, not included in the figure of 42 that was quoted previously.

Of course, when it comes to selecting the semifinal participants, debate and controversy are often in the mix. Teams in the so-called Power Five conferences are given priority to reward their tougher regular season schedules. The most prominent independent school—Notre Dame—seems to receive the same benefit. And the fifth-ranked team is never happy.

Teams in the Group of Five conferences, i.e. the non-power conferences, have a much harder time making the semifinals. While the highest-ranked Group of Five school is guaranteed a spot in one of the six elite games, no such guarantee is made for the two coveted semifinal games. In both 2017 and 2018, the University of Central Florida finished the regular season undefeated, failing both times to even receive an opportunity to play for the national championship.

 

So what are bowl games? They are 42 end-of-the-year college football games played largely for pride and money (for the schools, not the players), with two such games transcending mere fulfillment and cash and doubling as the semifinals. The teams in these latter two games may or may not have a better record than the teams in the other bowl games. And the final? I’m not quite sure if that’s considered a bowl.

(This article was updated on January 31, 2023.)