SBJ College: Expanded CFP didn’t slow awareness of Bowl Season

While noticeable changes are likely in store for the CFP after the first year of a 12-team field, its bowl game counterparts are delivering as consistently as ever.

ESPN’s non-CFP bowl season viewership through Dec. 30 was up 18% year-over-year, as the Alamo Bowl (an Alamo Bowl record 8 million with Coach Prime), Pop-Tarts Bowl (6.2 million), Liberty Bowl (4.2 million), Pinstripe Bowl (4.2 million) and Birmingham Bowl (4.1 million) each hit at least 4 million viewers. The Alamo and Pop-Tarts games even outperformed the Penn State-SMU first round CFP gameon TNT/TBS/truTV, despite airing against NFL action on Fox. 

“It continues to amaze me how some people want to diminish the excitement and the impact of bowl season when year-in and year-out it delivers, in a way, far greater than almost any other sporting event you can create in a three-week time period,” said Nick Carparelli, executive director of Bowl Season, the organization overseeing the non-CFP games.

How are bowls staying relevant?

Friday's Duke’s Mayo Bowl, even with its lowest attendance yet, is a shining example of a trend that’s continued to reap benefits for the bowls -- having fun.

The game, operated by the Charlotte Sports Foundation (CSF), was among the first to lean hard into the wild and whimsical side of college football, while the postgame “Mayo Dump” in which the victorious coach gets a mayonnaise dousing has become must-watch TV.

This year, that included a "Celebrity Mayo Dumper," Flavor Flav, who was dressed in a mascot costume ahead of the dump before being revealed to the audience, “Masked Singer” style.

“What I always enjoy seeing is the reaction of the players,” said CSF Executive Director Danny Morrison. “The players may be more excited than anybody to see their coach get the Duke’s Mayo bath. ... And that was a great addition, having the ‘Celebrity Guest Dumper,’ if you will.”

The Duke’s Mayo Bowl is far from the only bowl leaning into the fun side of college football while balancing the importance of the actual game.

The Pop-Tarts Bowl has been a boon for parent company Kellanova (which also owns longtime bowl sponsor Cheez-It)  and become a social media phenomenon. This year’s game included, among myriad features, a memorial for the strawberry Pop-Tart who was devoured by a victorious Kansas State squad after last year’s win outside Camping World Stadium, only for the pastry to be resurrected atop the scoreboard during the 2024 contest.

“A lot of questions have been answered in this particular bowl season,” Morrison said. “It was the first year of the [expanded] CFP, and there were some questions about, ‘Well, I wonder the impact that it might have on the non-CFP games.’ For the metrics to say that the non-CFP games were compelling ... and then the TV ratings were even better than they've ever been, that answered a lot of questions.”

Viewership for ESPN/ABC’s non-CFP bowls remains on pace for the best figure in five years, notes Flora Kelly, ESPN Research VP.

What’s next for the bowl system?

Fun and festivities aside, there’s still an ongoing push-and-pull between the growth of the CFP and how bowl games fit into the larger postseason discussion.

The viewership numbers show real value in bowl games. Opt-outs, too, remain a pressing discussion point, though this year each of the top 10 Heisman Trophy vote-getters played in their postseason games (half of whom participated in games outside the CFP).

Carparelli pointed to how NIL collectives have continued to adapt to opt-outs by creating language that makes certain payments contingent on players competing in bowl games as part of curbing the issue.

“This year, more than [anything else], has proven what we've been saying: College football needs bowl games,” Carparelli said. “The College Football Playoff is awesome. We all love it. But that's not enough of a postseason for college football. We need more than 12 opportunities. And regardless of how big the CFP may ever get, there's never going to be enough opportunities in the playoff alone to reward deserving teams for a successful seat -- especially when the definition of success is very, very different for some schools than they are for others.”

Texas’ star quarterback has a new NIL deal -- well, sort of.

Fanatics announced on Friday it signed “Sari Fercussin,” a player created in the EA Sports College Football 25 video game by prominent game streamer Sketch.

“Some people are saying it's silly. Other people are saying it's ingenious,” said Harry Barron, Fanatics’ creative director for social. “We choose the latter. At the end of the day, we're having fun.”

The idea of giving fictitious players their own NIL deals comes as EA Sports’ College Football 25 video game is setting records on its own. The game, the first in the series’ well-documented history that was put on pause for a decade for varying reasons, set an all-time U.S. sales record for a sports video game in December. Those kinds of sales have also been matched with consistent mention of the game online through social media channels, clips and more.

Fanatics wanted to tap into the craze around the game by providing NIL deals for some of those players created by users. As part of the deal with Sketch, Fanatics created a custom Texas jersey and an official trading card. Now fans who use the hashtag “#SignedbyFanatics” could be selected to receive a similar prize pack along with $1,000 in FanCash -- Fanatics’ in-house merchandise credit -- if they’re chosen for a deal.

“We're in this situation where we're playing on behavior that we were already seeing,” Barron said of the social strategy. “We kind of knew that if we added a really fun idea on top of what people are already doing [with the EA Sports video game], we would have a lot of fun with it, which is what we've seen.”

• ESPN’s Laura Rutledge, who was on the ground in New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl, recounted to my colleague Austin Karp how she went about covering the tragic events on New Year’s Eve, and how her approach on ESPN shows differed from reports she gave on ABC News or “GMA.”

• The debut of the CFP quarterfinals averaged 16.9 million viewers across the four games on ESPN/ESPN2/ESPN (Fiesta Bowl on New Year’s Eve, Rose and Peach on New Year’s Day and Sugar on Jan. 2), writes Karp. The figure is 59% higher than the first-round games this season and at the lower end of what the CFP semifinals averaged during the four-team era (the lowest semifinal doubleheader from 2015-2024 was 16.92 million in 2021, when Alabama-Cincinnati and Georgia-Michigan aired on New Year’s Eve).

• The College Sports Company (College Sports Co.), a college sports media and production firm whose work centers on NIL collectives, announced a successful $5 million raise led by Crosslink Capital. Additional investors include Boston Seed Capital, Tom Brady's media company Shadow Lion, Heat F Kevin Love, former Bleacher Report CEO Brian Grey and co-founder Dave Nemetz and Morning Brew co-founder Austin Reif.

• Northern Illinois' board approved its football team's move from the MAC to the Mountain West on Tuesday afternoon. The Huskies will begin play in the MWC in 2026.

• With the CFP semifinals looming Thursday and Friday, here’s a rundown of the payouts conferences and teams have received through the quarterfinals.

• Mobile motion capture provider BeOne Sports is the official technology partner of this week’s Hula Bowl, where it will track the college football all-star game’s athletes through practice and combine drills, reports my SBJ colleague Joe Lemire.