Bowl Games Matter, but not for Reasons you Think

The debate for the last several years is whether or not bowl games matter. Do they create value in recruiting, etc. when so many players sit out now-a-days? The answer may be yes, and it may be no.

With bowl games, the number of bowl games in 1990 was 19, and is now 43. What that means is the magic number is six wins. Back in the 90’s at least seven or eight used to be required. And even then, many teams were still left out with those records. This created more value in the bowl games from a prestige standpoint, and you also saw better-performing teams only year-over-year. It was a more coveted prize to be able to make a bowl game than it is now-a-days. With the increase to forty-three, it just seems like a formal post-season activity that the more than half of the teams in division one football participate in.

Since Christian McCaffrey and Leonard Fournette set trends in sitting out bowl games to prepare for the NFL and not get hurt, this has become such a main trend now-a-days for virtually all first round draft pick potentials. It’s gotten so bad that it was a big story this past year when Will Anderson and Bryce Young decided to play in the Sugar Bowl against Kansas State. While it’s understandable with lots of money to potentially lose by playing a bowl game and risking injury, it begs the question then – do bowl games even matter since most of the best players from each team sit out?

Whatever your opinion, bowl games still matter in a way that not many would think.

Bowl games matter, but not for reasons you think

Historically, the most prestigious bowl games are the teams with the best records in college football each season. Also, those games happen the latest in the bowl season. The “New Years Six” is an example we’ll use here. This includes the Cotton Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl, Peach Bowl, Rose Bowl, and Sugar Bowl. If not part of the college football playoff, the remaining bowl games on this list still boast teams that have had some of the best records in the country for that season. These games also happen in as insinuated in the title of the grouping – right around or after January 1st.

Team with worse records that still quality for Bowl games at 6-6 play in mid-December typically. You’ll notice a trend each year that the better a team’s record, the later date in bowl season they play.

What this means is that the teams that play later get more days to practice leading up to their bowl game, which also benefits them for the following season. So, it’s not necessarily so much in whether a team wins or loses now-a-days for whether a bowl game matters or not, but how late in the bowl season you play relative to how well your team performs. These extra practices may not seem like much, but they’re valuable. The NCAA has rules in place that state a team is allowed to practice leading up to their bowl game, but not beyond it. So, if a team for instance goes 6-6 and gets selected to play a bowl game on December 16th versus a team that makes the college football playoff that plays in the semifinals on or around January 1st, that’s 15 more calendar days a team has the option to practice. And teams can practice up to twenty hours per week.

This may not seem like much, but it adds up – especially if it’s a team that’s in the playoffs year-over-year.

Let’s take Alabama and Georgia from the SEC for example. Since Nick Saban took over in 2007, Alabama has played their bowl game on December 29th or later the last fifteen years. Nine of those fifteen years Alabama has appeared in the national championship game that has always come January 7th or after.

For Georgia, since Kirby Smart took over in 2017, the earliest they’ve played a bowl game is December 31st. That includes three national championship game appearances for three of those seasons that all happened on or after January 8th.

Let’s compare this to a team in theory that either doesn’t make a bowl game, or that makes a bowl game and has their game in mid-December due to being a team more towards the 6-6 record mark. For Georgia, over a span of six years, that equates to roughly ninety calendar days extra. For Alabama that equates to two hundred and twenty-five extra calendar days.

Per week, the rule as mentioned is 20 hours. So, in “extra practice hours,” that’s two hundred fifty-seven extra practice hours total for an average of forty-two per year for Georgia.

For Alabama it breaks down to six hundred and forty-two extra practice hours and an average of forty-two per year as well.

Bowl games are a season-by-season thing, but the reason cumulative numbers are important to note is over a duration of time is because players stay for multiple seasons, and it can also be argued that this ripples into long-term development as well for players that’ll be on campus in the future as they’ll be competing against even better competition going up against members on the team that have had that extra practice time under their belt already since they’re upperclassmen.

Also, with the majority of high school recruits now enrolling early, this is a huge advantage to teams that play after a certain date as those high school players are allowed to participate in the practices leading up to the bowl game. They cannot play in the actual game, but still practice with the team which gives them a jump start on their upcoming freshman season, and onward.

So, while the argument whether winning or losing a bowl game is an on-going one, the hidden long-term effect of extra practices is one worth noting. And as these numbers point out, over time for schools like Alabama and Georgia, this helps tremendously.