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The NCAA is finally capping the number of bowl games (until 2019)
It's a move that every sports fan in America can get behind -- well, unless you're a fan of lousy football. Or the coach of a lousy, FBS college football team.
On Monday, ESPN's Brett McMurphy reported the NCAA has put a three-year moratorium on adding new bowl games. That means that after a record 41 postseason college football games were played at the FBS level last season, no new games can be added until at least the end of the 2019 season.
It also means that three cities --- all hoping to jump in on the cash cow that is postseason football --- are out of luck, at least for now.
Here are some additional details from McMurphy:
And that last part might be the most important.
For years, even as the bowl games continued to pile up, there was at least one minimum standard to qualify for college football's postseason: You had to finish above .500. After all, it didn't seem like too much to ask of a team being "rewarded" for their regular season to at least finish with more wins than losses (or at least the same number) to get bowl eligible.
Of course, even that bare minimum was flipped on its head last year when three teams (Nebraska, San Jose State and Minnesota) all went to bowl games with 5-7 records, meaning that even the lowest minimum threshold to get bowl eligible no longer applied. The plethora of postseason games also led to some clunky matchups amongst teams that actually finished .500, including a battle between two Mountain West teams (Nevada and Colorado State) in the Arizona Bowl.
Point being, this seems like a good move on the NCAA's part.
Sure, some would argue that you can never have too many bowl games and that there's no such thing as "too much football."
But after watching San Jose State pull out that wild 27-16 win over Georgia State in the AutoNation Cure Bowl last December (yes, that was a real bowl), apparently someone decided enough is enough.
