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Bowl Game Booms

January 17, 2025

The College Football Playoff Has Elevated College Football to New Heights

I personally think that the last three weeks of the college football playoffs have sucked all the oxygen out of the room in terms of attention for college football. When they announced the new playoff schedule last season, I thought there was a high likelihood that other bowl games would see decreased viewership. Surprisingly, it was actually the complete opposite—viewership for non-playoff bowl games was actually up 18% from last year. This week, I wanted to share my thoughts on the new CFP schedule.

What Caused The Skepticism?

I think a few things immediately come to mind here, the first being that people were going to shift their attention to the playoff games. With 8 more teams in the playoffs, there would be more games to overshadow the non-playoff games. I also thought people wouldn’t care about the teams that didn’t make the playoffs (13th seed and lower). Lastly, bowl games like the Rose Bowl, which always draw a big crowd, are now part of the CFP.

Viewership is Up

Here are the TV viewership numbers for bowl games since late December, playoff bowl games (top 8) are all higher than non-playoff bowl games. It’s not surprising that the Rose Bowl between Ohio State and Oregon drew the highest rating of bowl games so far.

Here are the stats from the non-playoff bowl games:

Alamo Bowl: The game between BYU and Colorado set a record with 8.0 million viewers, making it the largest audience for any non-CFP bowl game. This is not surprising at all—Colorado has drawn a massive audience all year, everyone was excited to watch Deion Sanders, Travis Hunter and Shedeur.

Pop-Tarts Bowl: The matchup drew 6.8 million viewers, representing a significant increase and the largest audience for this bowl in at least nine years. This one has become a little bit of a meme because of the giant toaster.

Liberty Bowl: The game attracted 4.2 million viewers, the highest for this bowl in nearly a decade.

Pinstripe Bowl: Featuring Boston College and Nebraska, this game averaged 4.2 million viewers, the most-watched Pinstripe Bowl since 2013.

Attendance is Down

Despite viewership being up, attendance of the bowl games has actually been down 11% from last year. I think that this has been a trend lately for college football as there’s so much going on and so many events, including more overlap with other holiday bowl games/NFL games. Tickets can also be pretty expensive for bowl games, I’d imagine the economy has an impact on all of this as well.

What Was The Icing on the Pop-Tart?

One of the things the bowl games did well this year was creating viral moments and really leaning into each bowl’s branding. The Pop-Tarts Bowl was all over social media, breaking out beyond sports fandoms and becoming a pop culture moment. I don’t think anyone was ready for Flavor Flav to dump mayonnaise all over Minnesota’s head coach. I think this is the playbook that non-CFP bowl games should be running—I’d expect more of this next year. Shoutout to Duke’s Mayo.

The Big Takeaway…

The new College Football Playoff system is actually elevating the sport to new heights. The top non-CFP games saw an 18% increase in viewership, proving that college sports fandoms will still show up to watch bowl games even with the expanded and longer CFP system. These bowl games will need to continue doing what they did best this year: giving fans fun moments, like dumping a giant jar of mayo on the winning coach. The upcoming game on Monday should be a banger.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s Night Light, excited to share more with you all this year!