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NCAA says no new bowls until at least 2019

graham watson

The NCAA has banned the creation of new bowl games until 2019 at the earliest, the governing body confirmed Monday.

The decision comes after a year where three 5-7 teams had to fill empty bowl slots because there were not enough traditionally bowl eligible teams available.

Currently, college football allows 80 bowl eligible teams. That’s 63 percent of the teams in the FBS. In 1997, just 35 percent of college football’s programs were bowl eligible.

This is bad news for Austin; Charleston, South Carolina and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which had all hoped to add bowl games either in the upcoming year or in the near future.

The move is almost ironic. Just a few years ago, teams in Group of Five Conferences had teams with seven and eight-win seasons miss bowl games because there weren’t enough slots and the Power Five Conferences had the best bowl deals. Bowl creators almost overcompensated by adding a handful of new bowls in the past five years. Now it’s all about finding that happy medium.

The 2019 deadline is not an arbitrary date. Most bowl contracts will be up for renewal that year, which will ultimately determine which bowls live and which ones are sent to pasture. In 2013, ESPN and other networks created six-year deals with many bowls, some that have proven profitable and others that have become duds.

This also isn’t the first time the NCAA has instituted a bowl expansion ban. A three-year ban went into effect in 2011 while the NCAA studied licensing for bowls in the wake of the Fiesta Bowl’s financial scandal. After that ban was lift, six new bowls in Miami; Orlando; Boca Raton, Florida; Montgomery, Alabama; Tucson, Arizona; and the Bahamas were created.

Currently, an NCAA working group is examining whether to make bowl eligibility more stringent by changing the threshold from 6-6 to 7-5.

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Graham Watson is the editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at dr.saturday@ymail.com or follow her on Twitter!

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