If it prevents Miami from playing Louisville without Brian Brohm, I'm all for it.
IMO they need to just kill the damn thing and go to the playoff system. There's more money to be made there IMO. You could still have your New Years week bowl games. They could just be for final rankings.
Heck, the NFL used to have two finales: The Super Bowl and the 3rd place game (pitting the two conference championship losers against each other). They even played it at a neutral site (like the Orange Bowl). The bowl games are essentially the same thing already. There's one championship game.
Or, and this would be my choice, you could have the playoff system consisting of eight teams playing seven games (first round-4, semi finals-2, final-1) over 4 weeks (an off week between the semi's and the title game or between the conference championships and the playoffs).
You play the games at all the big bowls (Rose, Orange, Sugar, etc), rotating which bowls have host which games (as they do now with the championship game). There are currently eight January bowl games. So you incorporate that eighth bowl and allow for a third place game to happen (also played in January).
You still continue to have all the little bowl games you want in the meanwhile. The San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl doesn't have to go anywhere.
Sure this will kill the wonderful blitzkrieg that is "Bowl Week". But I honestly think this will make things BETTER for the fans. If you attend a bowl game, you're pretty much going to miss the rest of them played that day. This way you won't miss a single game. There won't be any lull between your last game in late November and the next game in January. Instead, you get the constant sensation that we in pro football (and every other division of college football) call "The Playoffs".
You now have a reason to watch college football EVERY weekend in
December. I would even argue that these smaller bowls would draw even more viewers than they do now as a result of this structure.
When there are national, meaningful games on that day, fans get into a mindset. A football mindset. They've already alotted that day (or a portion of it) to watching football. IMO the lower bowls would gain residual viewership from these bigger bowls, and have a larger audience than when they're the only ticket in town that night, or are sharing the evening with another lesser bowl.
And after all of this, you finish it off with the two biggest games on seperate nights in January.
