Kirk Herbstreit questions ESPN over how many bowl games college football has

Kirk Herbstreit has been one of the most prominent faces of ESPN’s college football coverage since joining the network in 1995. Given his three-decade tenure with the Worldwide Leader, the longtime ESPN College GameDay analyst isn’t afraid to question the status-quo, and recently admitted the sheer number of bowl games ESPN produces might be oversaturating the sport.

“I’ll say this, I feel like … I said this at a (ESPN) seminar one time, … ‘Are we creating too many bowl games?’” Herbstreit said during Monday’s episode of his Nonstop podcast with fellow ESPN colleague Joey Galloway. “Like, bowl games are supposed to be special. It’s supposed to be a reward for a great year. Do we have to have all these 6-6 teams and create these bowls 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 because ESPN has created (many of them).

“You know it used to be what, 15-18 bowls for forever,” Herbstreit continued. “And you had to basically be 8-4 to have a chance to even get in, because there were a lot of 8-4 teams that didn’t get to go to a bowl game back in the older days. Now, shit, they’re looking for anybody that has a roster to go to a bowl game.”

That was certainly evident when several bowl-eligible teams that underwent coaching changes opted out of participating in bowl games this offseason, including the Big 12’s Iowa State and Kansas State, which were fined $500,000 apiece by the conference for those decisions.

According to USA Today, all but three of the 41 major college bowl games this season will televised by ABC or ESPN, both owned by Disney. To Herbstreit’s point, that’s more than double the 18 bowl games that were held in 1995, when he first started at ESPN, and a significant increase from the 28 bowls held 10 years later in 2005.

ESPN Events, a division of ESPN, owns a portfolio that includes 17 college football bowl games, beginning with the Celebration Bowl on Dec. 13 between South Carolina State and Prairie View A&M, and ending with the Armed Forced Bowl on Jan. 2 between Rice and Texas State. In between are 15 bowl games ranging from the Fenway Bowl between UConn and Army (Dec. 27); the Texas Bowl between LSU and Houston (Dec. 27), and the Las Vegas Bowl between Nebraska and Utah on Wednesday.