FINALLY, 43 BOWL GAMES ARE KAPUT AFTER GEORGIA 63, FLORIDA STATE 3
The incensed Seminoles boycotted the Orange Bowl, which should abolish apathy surrounding non-championship bowls and push American eyeballs toward a dozen-team playoff system next season
The laughter of Rece Davis is funneling through the San Gabriel Mountains. He can’t stop chuckling in dead time before the College Football Playoff, dumbstruck at what must be the God-Forsaken Conclusion Of The Bowl Season Forevermore. These dozens of games are performed for some telecast-warped reason, 17 alone owned by ESPN Events, and must go away while never returning.
There is no point in furthering such meaninglessness when the action doesn’t involve the national championship. Next season, the sport will move to a 12-team postseason system, and, as we’ve seen with considerable pain, players who aren’t involved in the title hunt should not be wasting our time and theirs. Of 43 games this season, only six will be used in the formal future beyond first-round campus sites — Fiesta, Peach, Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton — which means we can bypass meetings with anything but the official tournament stamped on it.
So goodbye to the Pop-Tarts Bowl, the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl, the Scooter’s Coffee Frisco Bowl, the 68 Ventures Bowl, the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, the Myrtle Beach Bowl, the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl and all the rest. We know this after Florida State, which has our blessing in suing to leave the Atlantic Coast Conference and join a superconference such as the SEC or Big Ten, boycotted the Capital One Orange Bowl and made a complete farce of the rumpus. Mortified by the selection committee’s decision to omit the 13-0 Seminoles from the CFP while favoring one-loss Texas and Alabama, guess who didn’t show up for Saturday’s game in Miami?
More than two dozen Florida State players, including the top two running backs, top two quarterbacks, top two receivers, a starting tight end, three starting defensive linemen, two starting linebackers and three starting defensive backs. This is the portal gone haywire, with opt-outs and transfers blowing off the bowl, and it’s what we’ve seen from teams not involved in the current final four. The NFL draft awaits, with six Seminoles already preparing for it and joining the likes of Ohio State star Marvin Harrison Jr., North Carolina’s Drake Maye and other elite weapons. Never mind that fans pay big money and networks air the games. Now, we’ve seen the rawest debacle.
The final score was Georgia 63, Florida State 3. No bowl ever was trashed by a larger margin of victory, with the Bulldogs scoring on nine of 12 drives and gaining 673 total yards. The disintegration was pointed out by Georgia coach Kirby Smart, who won the last two national titles and was ashamed to be the champion of this muck. Listen to what Smart and Alabama’s Nick Saban have to say about what’s coming next. The holiday season will be without the humblings.
“People need to see what happened tonight, and they need to fix this. It needs to be fixed,” Smart said. “It's very unfortunate that they have a good football team and a good football program, and they're in the position they're in. You can say it's their fault and they have to solve their own problem. But college football has to decide what they want.
“I know things are changing, and some things are going to change next year. But you know what, there’s still going to be bowl games outside of those. People have got to decide what they want and what they want to get out of it. Because it’s really unfortunate for those kids on that sideline that had to play in that game and didn’t have their full arsenal. And it affected the game, 100 percent.”
The washout brings more grief to the sport as Florida State gathers its lawyers. A competitive event was crashed and tanked. And for all our sorrow, the Seminoles treated Capital One and other sponsors like garbage. Anyone who watched at home deserves an apology from ESPN.
“Every situation is different. Ours was unique, something that's never happened in college football,” FSU coach Mike Norvell said. “Ultimately, I think a lot of things made it extremely challenging. I fully believe that if we would have come up short in the (ACC) championship game, it might have been a little different. It was hard choices for a lot of the young men that were on our team. We were hurt. When you do the things that our guys did throughout the year and how they responded — the way they fought, the way that they just pulled together, it just hurt when we were not selected.”
A 60-point loss doesn’t make us feel better. “We’re a championship-level team. I don’t care,” Norvell said. “Go watch those 13 games and tell me what you saw. I’m fully confident in what this team did throughout the year and what they could have achieved. That was not the path that was set for us. So, obviously, I’m proud of the guys who competed tonight, and obviously we’ll get better from all of this. But we’ll never know.”
Said defensive tackle Braden Fiske, who didn’t dress with a right foot injury: “Missing out on the playoff threw everything for a loop, and we’re not going to get that opportunity again.”
Consider it another problem at ESPN, where chairman Jimmy Pitaro already has terminal messes. the network’s all-betting component is a joke with commercials turning Elle Duncan and Scott Van Pelt into frauds. Pat McAfee continues to be paid $17 million a year, but his show was gutted by baseball writer Jeff Passan, angered that one of the show’s producers reported the New York Yankees had signed Yoshinobu Yamamoto to a nine-year, $326-million deal. That was deadly wrong, with the deal 10 years for $700 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“Ty Schmit, you are a spectacular scumbag,” Passan said. “You are a scumbag. This show understands scumbaggery better than any show out there. Would you not say what Ty did last night was about as bad a thing as you could do to an entire fanbase? To make them think that the one guy all offseason they wanted and then, because of bourbon … your sources were named Jack, Jim and Jose!”
Curiously, Pitaro helped make Passan’s career at Yahoo Sports before signing him for big money in Bristol. Passan doesn’t care, pummeling McAfee’s guy. So between gambling and journalistic scumbaggery, what is Pitaro doing, exactly? Come Tuesday, he and his team must address bowl games.
“I think the bigger the playoff gets, the more it minimizes bowl games,” Saban said Saturday in Pasadena. “One of the great traditions of college football for many years was if you had a great season, you got to go to a bowl game. It's great for the players. They got a lot of positive reinforcement. But as soon as we started having playoffs — this is new and I'm not complaining about that — it started to minimize the importance of bowl games. The more we expand the playoffs — which I'm not against, I'm for — it minimizes the importance of bowl games.”
Why have them, then? The new focus will be on 12 teams, period. The others can go home, terminate the Famous Toastery Bowl in the Bahamas and end the scammery.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.