SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
For decades, January 1 was the biggest day of the year for college football. It still is, in some ways. There are several key playoff games happening, and fans are still talking about last night's big upset win where Miami took down Ohio State. But this is a year where college football's bowls just felt different. Many argue that the expanded playoff has diluted smaller bowl games that have long dominated late December, like the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl, which true fans know was once the Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl, the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl or, my personal favorite, the Pop-Tarts Bowl. Some big schools like Notre Dame have skipped bowls altogether. So with all of these changes to the sport, what does bowl season mean now? Does it still have the same significance? Chris Vannini, a senior writer at The Athletic, is going to talk about it with us. Thanks for coming on and Happy New Year.
CHRIS VANNINI: Happy New Year. Great to be here.
DETROW: Are you still processing that Ohio State game?
VANNINI: Yeah. I covered that game here in Dallas last night, and Miami now going to the semifinals, upsetting the defending national champion, Ohio State.
DETROW: I mean, we're coming up on the biggest stretch of it so far. But so far, what have you made of this year of expanded playoffs?
VANNINI: I think the expanded playoff has been a lot of fun. This is the second year it's happened. And if you look at the last nine teams to make the semifinals of the college football playoff, it's eight different schools. So we're getting a bit of parody in a sport that historically has not had very much of it.
DETROW: What have you make of this take that the playoffs have kind of really diluted the bowl system? I mean, I was poking fun at some of those bowls a little bit, but bowls are a big deal, especially for smaller schools that are excited to be there. Like, do you think this has really changed that system we're so used to?
VANNINI: Yeah. You have to say that it did. Because usually the national championship or the semifinals wouldn't happen until New Year's. And so you had almost all of December. The only college football you got were the bowl games. And so now we're thinking about the playoffs, and we're thinking about those teams more and more. That puts less focus on the bowls. And if you're a team that didn't make the playoff, the expanded playoff, you're less jazzed about going to a bowl game.
DETROW: Do you think that this is kind of the beginning of the end of that system that we've been used to for a long time?
VANNINI: I don't think so yet. The TV ratings are very good. ESPN likes having all of these bowls. It's some of the only content you get at this time of year, and the ratings for them are very good. And for a lot of these teams, it's the most watched game they have all season. You also have a good number of sponsors who want to get involved and really lean into the wackiness of it, like Pop-Tarts...
DETROW: (Laughter).
VANNINI: ...Like Cheez-It's doing, like Duke's Mayo, which dumps a jug of mayo onto the winning coach. You have the Frosted Flakes. You dump Frosted Flakes on the winning coach. So bowls are trying to lean into the fun, so I don't think they're going away yet. But you did see a handful of teams opt not to play in the bowls this year, and you do wonder if that is a trend that, down the road, starts to happen more.
DETROW: I mean, I have organized my late Decembers around making sure I can watch the Pop-Tarts mascots be eaten several years in a row now, so I get it.
VANNINI: Absolutely. For people who don't know, there is a couple of live Pop-Tart mascots, and at the end of the game, the mascot will jump into a fake toaster and a giant actual toasted Pop-Tart will come out, and the team will essentially eat the mascot alive. It sounds very intense when you put it that way. It's extremely funny.
DETROW: It's a ritual sacrifice.
VANNINI: It's a ritual sacrifice. Pop-Tarts has leaned into it, and the team that wins has leaned into it. And I think that's kind of a way these bowls are adjusting to this new era to keep themselves relevant, to keep people talking about them.
DETROW: That was Chris Vannini, a senior writer at The Athletic. Thanks for coming on, and Happy New Year.
VANNINI: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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