Wading Through Bowl Season, Part I

Last week's win over North Carolina did more than just extend the Boston College football season. Winning at home for the fifth time this season made the Eagles bowl eligible for the eighth time in the last nine years, while keeping them on pace for a .500 season in the Atlantic Coast Conference, but the way BC won - a 41-7 lead before two late Tar Heel touchdowns - injected new excitement into a program that experienced a sudden dormancy after its well-documented mid-season struggles.

The chance to break through the seven-win barrier, which hasn't happened since Frank Spaziani's first season as head coach produced an eight-win regular season in 2009, is now once again very much on the table for a BC team that entered November with slipping bowl aspirations. How that would happen remains in the air, but regardless of the result in this week's Senior Day game against Pittsburgh, it's known that the Eagles will play its final game at a neutral-site destination.

"It's great to be bowl eligible," said center Drew Kendall after Saturday's win. "That's always one of the goals when you go into the season, but at the end of the day, we want to have a winning record, so we have to go get ready for practice and get ready for Pitt."

Understanding what that means requires a good amount of context because Bowl Season has changed from era to era. Memories of the dozen-plus games from the 1994-1995 season are no more valuable to the modern era as the College Football Alliance or the Bowl Championship Series, which is to say that their existence is a big part of a system that no longer resembles anything from the imperfect system of past years and decades.

The bowl games were once invitation-only and largely devoid of conference affiliations. The vast majority of teams weren't in leagues anyways, but no system existed to determine top matchups within the national landscape. During the 1984 season, for example, No. 1 Brigham Young went to the Holiday Bowl as the Western Athletic Conference's champion but wound up playing a 6-5 Michigan team because the Big Ten champion was obligated to play the Pac-10 champion in the Rose Bowl. Second place Illinois, meanwhile, wasn't invited to a postseason game despite going 6-3 in the conference with separate wins over Michigan State, Wisconsin and Purdue, all of which went to a postseason game with a worse conference record.

The system wasn't necessarily designed for a concrete structure, but it remained in place until the number of games began expanding in the 1990s. The addition of a handful of games extended the list to 23 games before the end of the decade, but a further 50 percent explosion brought 32 bowl games to the schedule during the aftermath of the first wave of realignment. Slightly slower growth increased the number to 40 before the COVID-19 pandemic, and this year's full postseason is set to include 43 Division I games for 86 teams.

Based on sheer volume, it's not difficult to understand how people view that growth as an oversaturation that removes the special feeling associated with earning one more game. Every conference has a number of tie-ins to particular games, so finishing with six wins moves a team into consideration for selected matchups. Other criteria exist to avoid the 1984 conundrum of a national championship contender playing an eligible team that finished in the middle of another conference (hello, College Football Playoff!), but the criticism, regardless of how anyone feels about it, is an annual debate in the public college football sphere.

It's therefore critical to understand exactly why a bowl game is important for a particular program. Since 65 percent of bowl subdivision teams play in a game, the overwhelming majority of teams participate in an extra spring practice that develops younger players within the confines of a team system. Missing those practices threatens to send non-bowl teams into catch-up mode.

For older players, there's also the idea of playing one more game with teammates at a time when another overwhelming majority won't play professional football. By the numbers, less than 2 percent of college football players earn time on National Football League rosters, and the average NFL player is only on rosters for just over three years, on average. For many, playing one more college football game is one more ride through the sunshine and one more chance to earn a trophy before joining the real world.

And to the notion that bowl games are too static and devoid of invitation-only status, it's equally important to understand how bowl officials and conference partners jockey for position by season's end. It's not dissimilar to the 1980s or 1990s in the sense that bowl representatives visit stadiums specifically to scout and watch particular teams, and the conversations with conference partners and television outlets are designed to determine the most competitive and intriguing matchups within the league.

Bowls are increasingly split into equal-status tiers within the Atlantic Coast Conference to ensure a team like Boston College isn't immediately locked into a non-competitive or uninteresting bowl. Call it a "BC Rule' of sorts, but the memory of watching the Eagles slide down the bowl selection order because of technicalities is now prevented by the different criteria established within each league.

The ACC, for example, sends its champion to the College Football Playoff. In a past world where the Orange Bowl locked itself into the best ACC team or the next-best ACC team if the conference champion advanced to the four-team CFP, the new format hands byes to the four-best conference winners.

The next highest-ranked champion slots into first round matchups with seven at-large bids based on their CFP ranking for games scheduled for campus sites during the weekend before Christmas. Winners advance to the four quarterfinal games - this year, that's the Fiesta Bowl, the Peach Bowl, the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl - with the Orange Bowl and Cotton Bowl serving as semifinals ahead of the neutral site championship game on January 20.

The remaining ACC teams then slot into Bowl Season's selection based on several factors, including geographic proximity, an avoidance of repeat performances and matchups, and the competitive nature of individual games. For BC, that means the Fenway Bowl is off the table, but the remaining games, including the Duke's Mayo Bowl, the Bod Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl, the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl, and a repeat trip to the Birmingham Bowl from 2019 are very much available.

It's difficult to figure out which game the Eagles might want, but a win over Pittsburgh opens the gate on games against other competitive teams from power conferences or Group of Five leagues. Of possible wild card entries, Notre Dame enters the ACC selection order if it doesn't advance to the College Football Playoff (it's currently ranked No. 5), and Cal, a six-win team entering this week's game against SMU, must fulfill its Pac-12 bowl obligations until contracts expire in 2026.

Of the five games within the old Pac-12's lineup, three - the Independence Bowl, the Sun Bowl, and the Holiday Bowl - involve the ACC, so factoring where the Golden Bears might land is difficult to project. Washington State is an eight-win team heading into the bowl structure while Oregon State is one win over Boise State from joining a lineup with former conference rivals Arizona State, Colorado, Oregon (currently ranked No. 1 in the nation), Southern California and Washington - not to mention Cal.

That makes the entire conversation moot for at least a couple of weeks. What is known is that Boston College is bowling. What's also known is that this week offers a chance to finish 7-5 during a regular season that's been up-and-down for the past three months. A shot at eight wins is still part of BC's greater plan. How it all shakes down from there is almost irrelevant.

BC and Pittsburgh will kick off on Saturday at 3 p.m. from Alumni Stadium in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. The game can be seen on The CW network, locally in Boston on CW56.

Players Mentioned

Drew Kendall

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