Oregon head coach Dan Lanning announced on Sunday that his quarterback, Heisman Trophy finalist Bo Nix, would play in the Fiesta Bowl with his team for his last collegiate game. The very next day, USC head coach Lincoln Riley announced reigning Heisman winner Caleb Williams would not make the same choice, instead skipping the Holiday Bowl.
The first-round prospects and their different choices offer yet another chance to examine exactly what goes into the decision to play or not to play in the collegiate postseason.
Nix’s choice flies in the face of a common practice in recent years. While the idea of skipping any bowl game was stigmatized and seen as selfish even just a decade ago, it’s become expected for players with first-round potential who aren’t playing for a national championship to skip the postseason.
You don’t even need to go back that far to find an example as to why. Ole Miss quarterback Matt Corral hurt his knee in the Sugar Bowl less than two years ago. Michigan tight end Jake Butt had a career-altering injury in the Orange Bowl seven years ago. It makes complete sense why Williams, the odds-on favorite to be the first name called at the NFL Draft in April, isn’t willing to risk that status.
So is Nix’s choice meaningless? Is he a young kid recklessly risking his future for one last ride? That’s not a fair perspective. Nix’s status as a first-round pick is still up in the air, as he appears to be in a fight with LSU‘s Jayden Daniels, Michigan’s J.J. McCarthy, and Washington’s Michael Penix Jr. for the third quarterback in the upcoming NFL Draft. One more great performance could vault him up ten or fifteen spots higher on a team’s big board, especially if it’s the final lasting impression he makes.
The choice means more than the Oregon quarterback’s draft status, too. Nix and the Ducks are playing in a New Year’s Six bowl, one of the most prestigious trophies in the sport if you look beyond the playoffs. Lanning’s team surely had national title aspirations, and a different trophy won’t make up for that, but the Fiesta Bowl still offers a badge of proof. One final win can wash out the loss to Washington in the Pac-12 Championship game a little and offer a lasting way to prove how good this Oregon team was. Besides, the idea that Nix gets one more game with the players he’s spent the last two years with surely weighs into the math.
Those last points don’t mean Nix is making a selfless decision that Williams failed to match, however. One year after they were playoff contenders, the Trojans lost five of their last six games despite being the fourth-best scoring offense in the country. A Holiday Bowl victory doesn’t change the answer to whether or not this was a successful season for USC. Williams finished within the top 10 in the country in both passing yards and touchdowns and it wasn’t enough to win eight games. It’s also worth reminding that Williams played in the Cotton Bowl against Tulane last season after the Trojans were eliminated from playoff consideration.
If you’re looking for an opinion on whether one of these choices is objectively right or wrong, you won’t find it here. It’d be a few years too late, anyway. The college football landscape has seen enough injuries in late December to evolve past the idea that a player with as much on the line as Williams owes anybody a performance in the Holiday Bowl.
Nix’s choice is a welcome throwback in a sport that now too often gets simplified down to “Did you win the national championship or did you not?” Williams is yet another star player who correctly understands that sometimes the future is larger than one game. Both decisions can be the correct one for each guy.
More than anything else, it’s a sign of growth for the college football community that fans immediately accepted both ideas. The whole concept of the choice is that it is meant to be for each player. After a few too many years of bad-faith arguments, it seems we’ve gotten to that point.