The college football bowl game system is broken. Fans saw LSU’s Leonard Fournette and Stanford’s Christian McCaffrey skip their school’s final game so they could be healthy for the NFL Draft. With each player getting drafted in the Top 10 of the NFL Draft, there’s the chance that more players could do the same when the 2018 bowl games come around. So what should be done?
Easy, adopt a proposal that’s going around that allows redshirted players dress and participate in the school’s game. This would allow those seniors who don’t want to play in a meaningless game, while giving the opportunity for underclassmen to shine on a national stage.
According to Stewart Mandel, the American Football Coaches Association is forwarding a proposal to the NCAA that would allow players to participate in up to four games of a season without burning their redshirt year. If passed, theoretically, a coach could play a four or five-star talent at running back in the Music City Bowl or the Sun Bowl.
“I think that would be pretty intriguing to some of the fan bases,” said AFCA executive director Todd Berry to Mandel, “which might legitimize some of those bowl games and make them more interesting.”
Berry took it one step further.
“One could argue that [playing redshirts] is not what the bowl games are for,” said Berry. “Well, it is now. We lost this idea that every bowl game mattered a long time ago.”
But bowl games aren’t the primary impetus behind Berry’s proposal, one he says garnered “unanimous” support at the AFCA’s convention last January. (Fox Sports)
Berry is exactly right when he says that “we lost the idea that every bowl game mattered a long time ago.” There are three games that ultimately matter to the country as a whole: the two semifinal playoff games and the championship game. The other New Year’s Six bowl games gain some attention, but don’t mean anything for the team’s overall record outside of adding one more win onto their total for the year.
We’ve seen players lose millions because of playing in these meaningless games. In recent memory, there has been Jaylon Smith having his knee destroyed playing his last game for Notre Dame to Michigan’s Jake Butt seeing his first-round projection getting flushed down the toilet because of a bowl game injury.
Peter King pointed out in his Monday Morning Mailbag back in December what Smith would have made if he made it out of his Fiesta Bowl game healthy, “Say Jaylon Smith makes it through last year’s Fiesta Bowl, and goes fourth overall to the Cowboys, who clearly liked him a lot. He’d then be slotted a fully-guaranteed four-year, $24.96 million deal. Post-injury, he was taken 36th by Dallas and signed a four-year, $6.49 million deal with $4.52 million guaranteed. So that’s a loss of at least $18.47 million, and potentially as much $20.44 million.”
In a world where the athlete doesn’t get paid a dime while the coaches and administration make millions, it makes complete and total sense for the player to skip a game. Especially if that would cost the player,say, $20 million in future earnings just so someone who’s not putting their body through physical harm just so they can make a bowl game bonus.
Hopefully, the NCAA can see that their bowl game system is a cash-cow no matter who’s playing in it. This will allow the players who have sacrificed their bodies to the NCAA money machine the chance to save themselves and be fresh for the scouting combine and pro workout days while it allows the next wave of players get ready for the next season.
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