Move the Bowls to Week Zero

The bowl system is dying. Not overnight, not dramatically — it's dwindling. And I'm not convinced it survives in its current format much longer.

Sure, you can keep bolting more playoff games onto the calendar, keep adding bowl slots for teams that finish 6-6. But at some point the smaller bowls simply won't be able to draw enough interest to justify their own existence. No eyeballs, no sponsors, no revenue, no bowl.

So here's my proposal: stop treating every bowl game the same, and move most of them to the beginning of the season instead of the end.

Leave the big boys — the Playoff, the New Year's Six, whatever's left of the marquee bowls — right where they are, at the end of the year, when there's actually a championship on the line. Either fold the rest of the bowl slate into an expanded playoff structure, or cut it loose entirely from December. Then take all those mid-tier and lower-tier bowl games — the Gasparillas, the Frisco Bowls, the Myrtle Beach Bowls of the world — and play them in Week 0 and Week 1.

Why does this actually work?

First — the schedule problem is only getting worse. As more conferences push toward nine-game conference schedules, the incentive for big-name programs to schedule meaningful out-of-conference games keeps shrinking. Teams already have less appetite to risk a real non-conference matchup when nine conference games are unforgiving enough on their own. And with the playoff continuing to expand, that pressure only builds — more conference games, more playoff jockeying, less room and less incentive for a marquee non-conference matchup anywhere on the schedule. Games like Clemson-LSU simply might stop happening at all, not because fans don't want them, but because the modern schedule doesn't leave space for them.

That's exactly the gap Week 0 bowl games could fill — a built-in, made-for-TV non-conference matchup that actually means something, without touching a single conference game.

Second — the timing problem. By December, half these bowl games feel like funerals. Teams have opted out, star players are already prepping for the Combine, fans are tapped out from a long season, and depending on the level of bowl, that Tuesday afternoon game is between two teams nobody outside their home markets is thinking about. That's exactly why you get numbers like the 2025 Gasparilla Bowl — NC State vs. Memphis, a solid, competitive game — drawing only 13,336 fans in a stadium that seats over 65,000.

Now flip that. Play that exact same caliber of matchup in Week 0 or Week 1, when every fanbase in the country still has hope, nobody's been eliminated from anything yet, and the sport is at its most emotionally charged point of the entire year. Instead of NC State vs. Memphis in a half-empty stadium in December, picture NC State vs. Tennessee or Missouri in that same building in August. I'd bet that game comes close to selling out. People will absolutely watch two solid mid-level teams from competing conferences open their season against each other — especially with real hype behind it instead of holiday football fatigue working against it.

And picture Clemson and LSU opening the year in the Gator Bowl in Week 0. That's not a graveyard-shift game — that's a sellout, the first game of the season, with both fanbases fully engaged before a single loss has crushed anyone's expectations. But the bigger point isn't just about squeezing more juice out of games that already exist — it's that under an expanded playoff and nine-game conference schedules, games like that might stop happening at all. Week 0 bowls could be the only reason they still do.

There's a third benefit too — this format doesn't just help the blue bloods. Smaller programs get access to bowl venues and matchups they'd rarely see otherwise. A Group of Five team that normally never sniffs a stadium like Raymond James or EverBank could open its season there instead, against a name-brand opponent it wouldn't otherwise get on the schedule. That's a real opportunity for programs that usually only get exposure by upsetting somebody in November — now they get it in Week 0, with a real crowd and real stakes attached to it.

The bottom line: bowl games built around desperation and exhaustion in December don't work anymore. Bowl games built around hope, hype, and access in August might be exactly what saves them — for the blue bloods and the underdogs alike.