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College football will never be the same. The BCS changed its landscape, and then the College Football Playoff and the transfer portal have shifted it even further. With name, image, and likeness involved, the game that many of us grew up falling in love with looks vastly different from the structure that placed a heavy emphasis on the conferences and elite bowl games.
Thirty years ago, the bowl games meant something, at least to the top-ranked teams. Those teams wouldn’t always play one another, so the bowl game was their last opportunity to make a statement significant enough to get the voters to vote for them in the AP or Coaches polls.
Injury risk and a lack of competitive incentive have led to a rash of opt-outs across the country. Games that once looked intriguing from a national perspective have taken a hit because star players have decided to sit out. Pittsburgh and Michigan State are slated to lock horns in the Peach Bowl, but without Panthers’ quarterback Kenny Pickett and Spartans’ running back Kenneth Walker, the games don’t have the star power they once did, taking some of the shine off of an intriguing matchup.
Closer to home, Oklahoma’s Nik Bonitto, Isaiah Thomas, Perrion Winfrey, and Brian Asamoah have decided to opt out. In addition to the transfer of Spencer Rattler, Austin Stogner, and Jadon Haselwood, those opt-outs have left Oklahoma without several significant players as they prepare to play the Oregon Ducks in the Alamo Bowl.
From the individual player’s perspective, it’s understandable. Though injuries can happen at any moment, taking one in a game akin to a preseason NFL game may not make as much sense. See, a guy like Jaylon Smith, who played in the Fiesta Bowl for Notre Dame, blew out his knee and watched his draft stock drop by a full round, and his career hasn’t been the same since the devastating injury.
For better or worse, that’s something these players take into consideration as they prepare for the next leg of their journey. Were the Sooners next game part of the college football playoff, they would be in practice with their team preparing to make a run at a national championship. Instead, they’re getting ready for the Senior Bowl or the NFL Draft Combine.
From a fan perspective, it’s unfortunate that we won’t get to watch our favorite team at full strength heading into the final game of the year. The networks and the schools lose out because the star players they’d use to advertise the game can’t be used for promotion because they won’t be playing in the game. Because the bowl games lose a bit of juice, they won’t be worth as much to advertisers in the future, ultimately hurting the universities in the potential payouts for the bowls.
But what can be done? It seems that this is a door that will be difficult to close.
First of all, expanding the College Football Playoff to 12 or 16 teams will create a greater incentive for more players to stay engaged in meaningful football games. Instead of players from four teams with something to play for in late December and January, you’d have three to four times as many players engaged in the postseason.
Having more teams allows more players to be involved in promotional advertising of the playoff and the bowls associated with it. Playoff expansion is coming down the pipeline.
The next thing that schools, bowls, and advertisers can do is incentivize playing in a bowl game that may or may not have national implications. NIL has created options for businesses to engage with student-athletes to allow them to profit off of their name, image, and likeness. Advertisers and bowl sponsors could develop a bonus package to encourage players to play in the bowl game.
Through NIL deals, players could be compensated for playing bowl games by the bowl sponsor and the network carrying the game. Though there’s a resistance to outright paying players to play college football, individual deals that engage student-athletes could be a way to keep the players around long enough to play in the bowl games.
There’s no easy answer to this, but if this is a problem for bowl game committees, advertisers, and networks, they need to figure out a joint solution to keeping the players engaged in the bowl season.
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