NIL

Why College Football Teams Are Turning Down Bowl Game Bids

Published

22 hours ago

December 12, 2025

Teams are increasingly declining bowl bids due to coaching changes, NIL dynamics, transfer portal chaos, and financial losses, reshaping the postseason landscape.

Throughout college football history, the bowl game marked the celebratory conclusion of a successful season, or at least one in which teams finished with at least a .500 record and became bowl-eligible. Teams’ fans travel from far and wide to cheer their team on national television in a festival-like environment. But the new era of college football has threatened the model that has served the sport admirably for more than 80 years.

Notre Dame declined its invitation to the Pop-Tarts Bowl this week after being omitted from the 12-team College Football Playoff field, but so did 8-4 Iowa State and 6-6 Kansas State. And to replace those teams and complete the full field of 41 bowl games, some teams that went 5-7 were invited. But then, other 5-7 teams declined as well, including Florida State, Auburn, Kansas, Baylor, Rutgers, and UCF.

Why would college football teams decline to play in the postseason, something college teams, players, and fans look forward to all year? There are a few reasons, according to Matt Brown, who writes the excellent Extra Points college sports newsletter on Substack.

“The dirty little secret is these games often lose money for the schools,” Brown told Boardroom. Lower-tier bowl games require schools to buy a certain number of tickets. “If you’re a Power 4 team and you’re 6-6 or 5-7, your fans are not going to be as excited about buying ticket packages to go watch you play Central Michigan. There’s also the fact that the calendar itself has significantly changed.”

The college coaching carousel seemingly started earlier than normal this year, with James Franklin being fired from Penn State and Lane Kiffin famously leaving Ole Miss for LSU. Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell left the Cyclones for the Penn State job, while Kansas State’s Chris Klieman announced his retirement. Those coaching changes, Brown believes, were big contributors to ISU and K-State declining their bowl games. And even though the Big 12 fined each school $500,000 for not participating in bowl season, that fine may have been less than the losses they would’ve incurred had they gone through with their bowl games.

For those 5-7 schools that declined offers, they had already begun their respective offseason processes. Assistant coaches were scrambling for better opportunities elsewhere. A percentage of rosters were already making moves via the transfer portal. In some of these cases, it may have been difficult to cobble together a roster and a coaching staff to make this bowl appearance happen. The NIL and transfer portal era, as Brown alluded to, makes the calendar more difficult for these schools to be nimble enough to accept an invitation on short notice.

NIL has also made the allure of these smaller bowl games less appealing. Bowl games, even as recently as 5-10 years ago, were known for the gift packages players received, which were big considering players weren’t officially allowed to make money.

“Even if you were going to a lousy bowl game and didn’t have a great season because it was kind of like a mini vacation where you were allowed to receive gifts,” Brown said. “You might get a free PlayStation, a Fossil watch. You typically do a bunch of team-building activities, and the practices aren’t as intense. But if you’re making $145,000 a season to play football, do you give a shit about any of that?”

If this trend of more teams opting out of bowl games becomes more prevalent, no stakeholder has more to potentially lose than ESPN. The network not only holds broadcast rights to all but a few bowl games, but also owns and operates 17 of the games outright under its ESPN Events umbrella. Luckily for the worldwide leader, Brown doesn’t think ESPN needs to be too concerned about the current bowl game model being threatened by some 6-6 or 5-7 teams opting out.

“For these lower-tier bowl games, the only reason that these games are worth it for ESPN is because of the television rating that it would generate as essentially gambling inventory during a slow time on the sports calendar,” Brown said. “And it doesn’t really matter who plays in the game. The Boca Raton Bowl is going to do about the same rating, given its time slot and date, no matter who you potentially fill in from there. Having to use Appalachian State instead of Auburn or Rutgers doesn’t fundamentally change the value prop for ESPN at all. And for that matter, they could have 15% of both teams opt out to hit the transfer portal, and it won’t change ESPN’s value prop. Roughly the same amount of people are going to watch the game. If those ratings begin to ever dip, that would change the model. But people in this country really like watching football in December. They don’t really care who it is.”

Brown doesn’t think it will be common for a team that expects a bowl invitation to decline. You may still see it for 5-7 teams, especially from power four conferences, since there’s almost always going to be significant turnover on those rosters and coaching staffs. For a blue-blood program like Ohio State, Texas, or Notre Dame, Brown could see them decline bowl invites if they somehow go 6-6 in a given season.

Hypothetically, bowl games could incentivize certain teams and players to participate by offering them more money. But a large majority of these lower-tier games already operate on razor-thin margins, Brown said, and it’s a lot easier to pay an NIT-bound basketball team of 12-15 players than a 6-6 football team of 80-90 players.

So as long as the current model of revenue sharing, NIL, and the transfer portal in college sports remains the same, there will inevitably be major conference .500 teams that feel that going to a bowl game is just not worth it for them. While the tradition and pageantry of the bowl season will live on, along with fans getting their December gambling fix on ESPN, some fan bases looking forward to seeing their mediocre team play one more game will inevitably just have to wait ’til next year.