Jump to content
View in the app

A better way to browse. Learn more.

Surly Horns

A full-screen app on your home screen with push notifications, badges and more.

To install this app on iOS and iPadOS
  1. Tap the Share icon in Safari
  2. Scroll the menu and tap Add to Home Screen.
  3. Tap Add in the top-right corner.
To install this app on Android
  1. Tap the 3-dot menu (⋮) in the top-right corner of the browser.
  2. Tap Add to Home screen or Install app.
  3. Confirm by tapping Install.
Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business & Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Advertise... Tailgate Donations

Featured Replies

49 minutes ago, satyanash said:

The Birmingham Bowl finally has a matchup! Hilariously, App State just played Georgia Southern a month ago (they're conference rivals)

 

You know there's too many bowls when you're begging for 5-7 conference rivals to agree to a rematch.

How do these low-end exhibitions make any damn money?

  • Replies 1.4k
  • Views 135.6k
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Most Popular Posts

  • Hook’em!!!

  • You'll probably be thanking Penix for getting Sark fired after this one.  Still can't believe Sark is your coach, what happened to TEXAS?

  • BigPenixEnergy
    BigPenixEnergy

    I haven't seen any meaningful counterpoints to the 5 reasons.  Without Bijou Rodman, Texas doesn't even have a team. 

Posted Images

1 hour ago, Jimbob said:

At which bowl game are all the Pavia getting arrested and banned for life from?

ReliaQuest Bowl vs Iowa in Tampa FL on NYE

Tampa Bowl Games and Sports Events This Weekend

1 hour ago, nineliveslost said:

because they are being bitches the prior year. FAFO

Again, why does the CFP care?

2 hours ago, Kennythetiger said:

I think the horns would be too fragile. You’d have a bunch of polled cows when you open the bag. And a bunch of loose horns clear down at the bottom. 

Those would fly off the shelf in college station

5 hours ago, Sir Ulrich said:

Bowls aren't going anywhere. These numbers outpaced the average bottom 12 P4 game this year.

2024-ESPN-Events-College-Bowl-Season-Viewership-v8-1536x864.thumb.png.ce28cf991c5128f6d455ee3b16fb926f.png

Let’s check these numbers again in a few years. 

8 minutes ago, Wilcox Cummingtonite said:

Let’s check these numbers again in a few years. 

Hell, with those two teams, bet the Citrus bowl gets more eyeballs than a good number of playoff games.

App St. says "fuck that cold ass weather in Boone.  Let's go to Florida and play ball."  Good for them, they're not scared. Go Mountaineers! 

                                                                                                  ^Alabama ^

Edited by Bevo&Pevo

3 hours ago, Bevo&Pevo said:

App St. says "fuck that cold ass weather in Boone.  Let's go to Florida and play ball."  Good for them, They're not scared. Go Mountaineers! 

Birmingham, Florida?

image.jpeg.8cce431a275c1ad3f311861a07fc7a98.jpeg

2 hours ago, randomhorn said:

Birmingham, Florida?

image.jpeg.8cce431a275c1ad3f311861a07fc7a98.jpeg

It was midnight and I should have known better to think I was coherent enough to post something as if I were capable.  Usually, bad things happen to me at that time, my clothes turn into rags, the car becomes a pumpkin and mice, etc.  I sit on a throne of lies.  I'm glad I don't take myself too seriously.  Fixed it.

 

I think the horns would be too fragile. You’d have a bunch of polled cows when you open the bag. And a bunch of loose horns clear down at the bottom. 

So it would look like a bag of dicks?
App St. says "fuck that cold ass weather in Boone.  Let's go to Florida and play ball."  Good for them, they're not scared. Go Mountaineers! 
                                                                                                  ^Alabama ^

As in Birmingham, Sweden.
17 hours ago, Red Five said:

Why are some of those teams declining bowl bids?

Some like ISU and KSU are in a coaching transition. 

Others have "transitioned to offseason" as in they have pretty much closed up shop and are moving into portal/recruit mode. 

There are too many bowl games.

ND is a bunch of babies.

  • Author

Brett McMurphy: LA Bowl will permanently end after Saturday's Washington-Boise State game

Quote

The LA Bowl will end after Saturday’s game between Washington and Boise State, sources told On3. The bowl’s current 6-year contract concludes after this season. The bowl was created in 2020 to be played in SoFi Stadium, pairing up the Mountain West champion against the fifth selection from the Pac-12. The bowl’s fate was ultimately decided when conference realignment gutted the Pac-12 and the league lost 10 schools to the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC.

The bowl was scheduled to debut in 2020, but three weeks before its inaugural game, it was canceled due to COVID-19. In its short five-year history, the LA Bowl has had four different official names: Bucked Up LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk (2025), Art of Sport LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk (2024), Starco Brands LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk (2023) and Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl presented by Stifel (2021–2022).

Besides the LA Bowl, the Bahamas Bowl also will not continue. The Bahamas Bowl was replaced by ESPN in this season’s bowl lineup by the Xbox Bowl in Frisco, Texas.

 

  • Author

Sam Neumann: Rick Neuheisel suggests moving bowl games to beginning of season to save them from extinction

Quote

Rick Neuheisel went on The Dan Patrick Show this week and floated an idea about the future of bowl games that sounds insane until you think about the alternative. The former UCLA quarterback and head coach suggested bowl games could move to the beginning of the season instead of the end, functioning as actual competitive matchups rather than the postseason rewards they’ve always been.

It’s radical, but it might be the only way to keep bowl games from disappearing entirely. “I think it’s a sign of the times,” Neuheisel said about Notre Dame opting out of a bowl game. “We saw Iowa State, we saw Kansas State make similar decisions — obviously coaching changes there as part of it. I think bowl games are going to end up being the first game of the year. I think we’re going to see a bunch of these bowls go by the way of the whales. And I also think the College Football Playoff is going to go — as they extended that deadline to Jan. 23 — I think we’re going to go right past 16 all the way to 24.”

Dan Patrick asked him to explain what he meant by bowl games being the first game of the year.

“I think we’re going to have a hard time talking a bunch of teams into playing in the postseason,” Neuheisel continued. “Maybe I’m wrong — and I hope I am — because I remember vividly how much I enjoyed them both as a player and as a coach. I just think in this day of transaction football, where people are coming and going, that there are going to be a lot of teams and we’re going to see a lot of players that aren’t going to participate. And I think that’s a shame. So, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bunch of these bowl games get moved to the front end of a college football season.”

The idea is wild, but college football doesn’t have preseason games. Programs have talked about playing competitive scrimmages instead of spring games, but it hasn’t happened. Moving bowl games to August would solve multiple problems. Teams wouldn’t lose players to the transfer portal or opt-outs. Freshmen would get real game experience. Coaches could sort out position battles before the season starts. And bowl games would still exist instead of dying off entirely.

It would also be completely different from what bowl games have always been. They’ve always been rewards for good seasons, not warm-up games before the season even starts. But Neuheisel’s point is that the current system isn’t working. Notre Dame, Iowa State, and Kansas State all opted out this year. Players are sitting out. Rosters are getting gutted by the portal. At some point, bowls either change or disappear.

Whether moving them to the front of the season is the answer is debatable. But the fact that a former Rose Bowl MVP and head coach is seriously suggesting it tells you how broken things have gotten.

 

On 12/11/2025 at 10:24 AM, satyanash said:

Sam Neumann: Rick Neuheisel suggests moving bowl games to beginning of season to save them from extinction

 

The spring games have been getting cancelled.  Why not have the minor 'bowl' games around the time spring practice ends.  It would give everyone a chance to cool down after the real season and a chance for the playes to test whether they need to leave for the portal.

On 12/16/2025 at 1:20 PM, notre dame joe said:

The spring games have been getting cancelled.  Why not have the minor 'bowl' games around the time spring practice ends.  It would give everyone a chance to cool down after the real season and a chance for the playes to test whether they need to leave for the portal.

Portal no longer available in spring/summer...

Multiple podcasts are having discussions about Week Zero Bowl games, but not sure it's worth the injury risks... 

 

  • 2 weeks later...
  • Author

Sam Neumann: Kirk Herbstreit raises concerns about 'too many bowl games' at ESPN seminar

Kirk Herbstreit admitted he once questioned ESPN’s bowl game strategy directly to the network’s face, and it didn’t go over particularly well. During the most recent episode of his Nonstop with Kirk and Joey podcast, the College GameDay analyst revealed to his co-host, Joey Galloway, that he had previously raised concerns about bowl game oversaturation at an ESPN seminar, arguing that placing 6-6 teams in bowls diminishes what should be a reward for successful seasons.

“I feel like I said this at a seminar one time,” Herbstreit said. “The back of the room — when you and I sit back there — I’ll raise my hand, pull the button down, pull the mic down, and say, ‘Are we creating too many bowl games? Bowl games are supposed to be special. They’re supposed to be a reward for a great year. Do we have to have all these 6-6 teams and like creating these bowl games just because they rate well? I feel like we’re oversaturating the bowl season.’ And that didn’t go over real well when I brought that up at the ESPN seminar.”

Herbstreit’s bringing this issue back to the forefront comes as bowl season has expanded dramatically over the past two decades. College football now has 43 bowl games, meaning 86 teams participate in postseason play. That requires teams to reach just 6-6 to qualify, a threshold Herbstreit clearly thinks is too low. “It used to be what, 15-18 bowls forever?” Herbstreit said. “And you basically had to be 8-4 to even have a chance to be in. There were a lot of 8-4 teams that didn’t go to bowl games back in the olden days. And now, sh*t, they’re looking for anybody that has a roster to go to a bowl game.”

Ahead of the 2024 playoff, Herbstreit openly questioned whether non-playoff bowl games should exist at all if players don’t want to play in them. This time, though, he acknowledged that he’s been pushing against the same issue internally for years.

“I feel bad because when I turn into a bowl game that actually has good teams that had good seasons, I’m dialed in,” Herbstreit said. “Let’s go. I don’t care if it’s FBS, Group of Five, Power Four, whatever it is. If it’s two teams that have had good years, put them out there and let’s watch them play. So, that was the first part of what started to deteriorate bowl season. And then the second part was, ‘I’m not going to play. What’s the point in playing? It’s an exhibition. Who cares?’ So those two things, I think, have turned the bowl season into why should we even bother?”

Even so, Herbstreit hasn’t tuned out entirely. He pointed to games like Penn State’s Pinstripe Bowl win over Clemson and BYU vs. Georgia Tech in the Pop-Tarts Bowl as proof the concept still works — when both teams show up.

“I’m still a dinosaur. I’m still a guy that if there’s a bowl game on, chances are I’m going to give it every opportunity to chase me away,” Herbstreit continued. “If it’s just bad football or you’re like, ‘Where’s that guy?… What’s the point in watching? This isn’t even the same team that’s playing.’ But there have been a few. Like, the Penn State game was great. The Georgia Tech-BYU game. I couldn’t turn that off. That was an amazing game.”

Those games are the exception, not the rule — and that’s the point Herbstreit keeps circling back to. His issue isn’t with bowl games themselves, but with how diluted they’ve become and how often they feel like obligations rather than rewards. That’s an uncomfortable truth for a network that profits from volume rather than selectivity. And judging by the reaction he got, it’s one ESPN isn’t eager to revisit.

  • satyanash changed the title to We're Going Bowling!!!

It’s called enshitification, Kirk. And it’s your employer’s mission statement.

  • Author

Keith O'Brien: The Slow, Inevitable Death of the Bowl Game

It’s been a hard month for the once-prestigious college bowl. Just hours after Notre Dame learned that it would not be included in this season’s College Football Playoff—the mega-popular, multibillion-dollar, 12-team invitational that crowns an NCAA Division I champion—the team announced that it would not play in any bowl whatsoever this year. Nine other programs, including Florida State, Auburn, and Baylor, soon followed Notre Dame’s lead, declining bowl bids. Fans, pundits, and football insiders lashed out at these schools for refusing to finish out the season with one final game. Notre Dame took the brunt of the criticism; people called the team “quitters” and wondered if its choice sounded “a death knell” for the entire bowl tradition.

Here’s the reality: The bowls have been dying a slow death in terms of cultural importance since 1998, when the college-football power brokers instituted the first national-championship game open to teams from every major conference. The move to a four-team playoff in 2014 hastened the decline of the old bowl system, and last year’s expansion to a 12-team playoff put it on life support. With the best teams now competing in a proper playoff, the other postseason games have effectively become consolation prizes, late-season scrimmages with no stakes whatsoever.

It should have been obvious that this format would render the pageantry of the bowls irrelevant. The power brokers who created the national-title game back in 1998 worried as much: “In an effort to focus on a championship game,” the Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese said way back at the start, “we’re putting all the other bowls in a negative position.”

At the time, the bowls truly mattered. In the 1989–90 season, teams played just 18 bowl games. For many players, a bowl game was one of their only chances to appear on national television, and the exposure launched careers. The Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, and the Cotton Bowl dated back to the early 20th century and managed to transcend sports, becoming must-watch TV on New Year’s Day—the Rose Bowl perhaps most of all. Jim Delany, a former commissioner of the Big Ten, told me recently that the teams in his conference didn’t dream about winning national titles; they dreamed about going to Pasadena, California, to play in the Rose Bowl. “It was welcomed as a cultural event,” Delany said. “It had a great time slot on New Year’s Day—at 2 p.m. local, 5 p.m. eastern. The parade and the ratings were Super Bowl–esque in the ’50s and ’60s.”

Even the lesser bowls—such as the Holiday Bowl, played for the first time in 1978 in San Diego—mattered. Ty Detmer, the quarterback at Brigham Young University from 1988 to 1991, threw for 576 yards against Penn State in the 1989 Holiday Bowl, which was broadcast on ESPN. The following season, Detmer won the Heisman Trophy, the most prestigious award in college football. In a lot of ways, Detmer told me, he could trace his Heisman win to his performance in that game against Penn State. “That put us on the map,” he said. “That was the culmination of our season, even though it wasn’t a national championship.”

But the tradition of the bowls was also slowing the growth of the game. In many seasons, the best teams in the country never crossed paths. They played in different conferences during the regular season and didn’t match up in the bowls. That left it up to pollsters to determine a national champion by a vote. Many years, they returned different results, leading to two champions; in the 1990s, fans were horrified when three seasons ended without a clear winner.

Fans demanded a new system—and one man had a solution. Roy Kramer, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, believed that he could preserve the sanctity of the bowls while giving people the national champion they wanted. Kramer pulled together a coalition of fellow commissioners, including Delany at the Big Ten. Together, they laid the groundwork for the Bowl Championship Series, a format that would include every major conference and create the first-ever national-title game that would name an indisputable college-football champion. Huddling in a small library at the SEC headquarters with a young public-relations man named Charles Bloom, Kramer set out to invent a mathematical formula that used data points, including a team’s overall record and the strength of its schedule, to determine which two teams should get the call to play in the title game.

Bloom, who is now an athletic director at the University of South Carolina, told me that Kramer was driven to get the formula right, demanding “relentless research.” When they thought they had one that worked, Kramer and Bloom checked it against the results of previous seasons to make sure that it successfully chose the best two teams. And when the system was unveiled, in 1998, Kramer had created a new—and more certain—world. Finally, the college-football season would end with a clear champion.

Almost immediately, the criticism came. “Today, people are arguing about the 12th and 13th teams,” Bloom said. “Well, back then you were arguing about the second and third teams.” Every year, teams felt snubbed. The arguments, at times, grew heated, and people began calling for a bigger playoff. Kramer pushed back. He said that he could list “100 reasons” an expanded playoff would be bad for the sport—one being that it would make the bowls irrelevant. But by the early 2000s, Kramer was in his early 70s and nearing retirement. From the moment he left the SEC, in 2002, younger voices began rallying support for playoff expansion. After years of debate, a four-team playoff began in 2014.

But with more spots in the playoff field, more teams could now make a credible case that they should have been included. Arguments became a staple of bowl season. Delany, who was still the commissioner of the Big Ten at the time, knew what was coming next: an even bigger playoff. “It was obvious that it was going to grow, and going to grow, and going to grow,” he said, “because no matter what you give, people want more.”

In general, most people would agree that the 12-team playoff, launched last year, has been good for college football. Teams competing this season will split nearly $120 million in winnings. ESPN inked a $7.8 billion deal to broadcast these games through the 2031–32 season, and if last year’s ratings are any indication, fans will be tuning in to watch: The title game in January drew a TV audience of more than 22 million viewers.

Before the second season with the new playoff format is even over, Kramer’s predictions are already coming true. The bowls do mean less, because the playoff is now everything. This postseason involves 11 playoff games, with high stakes and big crowds—as well as 35 other bowl games, played for the most part by mediocre teams with mediocre records, with very little fanfare at all. These games aren’t the Rose Bowl of yesteryear. They aren’t even the Holiday Bowl circa 1989. They’re the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl, the GameAbove Sports Bowl, the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl.

And in the years to come, you can bet that more college programs will skip them. They won’t want bowls; they’ll want the playoffs, which the college-football power brokers are already considering expanding—to 16 teams, or maybe 24. It’s the future that Roy Kramer feared. At least he won’t be around to see it. He died at the age of 96 early this month, just a few days before Notre Dame got snubbed, took its football, and went home.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...
Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business & Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Advertise... Tailgate Donations

Configure browser push notifications

Chrome (Android)
  1. Tap the lock icon next to the address bar.
  2. Tap Permissions → Notifications.
  3. Adjust your preference.
Chrome (Desktop)
  1. Click the padlock icon in the address bar.
  2. Select Site settings.
  3. Find Notifications and adjust your preference.