Rece Davis thinks bowl games need to stop pretending and start paying players directly if they want to survive.
On his College GameDay Podcast, Davis proposed turning bowl games into cash competitions modeled after college basketball’s Player’s Era Festival.
“Here’s what you do — and I think I’ve said this before — it becomes like The Player’s Era Festival in college basketball. You go play for money,” Davis said. “You go to a non-Playoff bowl game or any bowl game, and there’s a cash prize for the players. And Winners get more, and losers get less. Play for money. You’re already playing for money, so let’s play for some big prize. You know, get a corporate sponsorship, hype it up, and you play for money. That’s what I think you can do for the bowls.”
The Player’s Era Festival has worked for college basketball, expanding from 18 teams to 32 next season, because cash prizes get players to show up and compete. Davis thinks the same approach could salvage what’s left of the bowl system before it completely falls apart.
The ESPN host shot down other proposed fixes, including playing bowl games at the start of the season or making them exhibition games that don’t count toward records. Those ideas wouldn’t work because nobody would care about games that don’t affect anything, and college football already has enough trouble getting people to care about non-playoff bowls.
The bowl system has been dying since the College Football Playoff expanded to 12 teams. Notre Dame declining a bowl bid after missing the playoff made that clear, as did Kansas State and Iowa State both backing out of bowl games this month after coaching changes.
ESPN owns 17 bowl games and broadcasts many more, which gives the network a real stake in keeping the system from completely collapsing. And to his credit, Davis didn’t try to hide the business reality behind his proposal.
“Let’s not all be disingenuous here. We’re all in the television industry. We need inventory. We want the bowl games to be played for inventory,” Davis said. “And for people who are about to listen to the aggregators who are about to clip that off and say, ‘Listen to him, he just cares about the money.’ Guess what? You want to watch, sweetheart. We all do. We want to watch football.
“Here’s another sneaky little secret: football players like to play football. So, why don’t we let football players play football, let TV people who want to broadcast football, broadcast football, and then we’ve got to do something to make this more viable? So, the bowl guys, you’re going to have to find a way to offer cash and prizes to the players to play. So that’s what you do — big fat prize.”
Davis added that the prize money would scale based on the matchup, with bigger games offering larger payouts than smaller ones. A Jacksonville State-Troy bowl game wouldn’t have the same prize as Michigan-Texas, but it would still offer something worth playing for.
At the very least, Davis is proposing something that deals with where college football actually is instead of where people wish it still was. The sport already sold off most of its meaningful traditions for television contracts, so pretending bowl games will survive on nostalgia alone doesn’t make much sense. If cash prizes are what it takes to get players to show up and compete, that’s probably the only option left that hasn’t been tried yet.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.