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SEC Sports
ESPN announced Friday that it will cancel two of its 17 college football bowl games for the 2020 season. The Bahamas Bowl and the Hawaii Bowl -- both scheduled for December -- have been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and travel restrictions surrounding it.
“We are disappointed that we aren’t able to stage events at these premier destinations this year,” said Pete Derzis, ESPN senior vice president of college sports programming & ESPN Events. “We are committed to bringing both games back in 2021, and we thank our conference partners, sponsors and the local communities for their ongoing support and understanding.”
The Football Oversight Committee last week recommended waiving the requirement for bowl eligibility during the 2020-21 postseason. Previously, schools were generally required to post a .500 record or better against FBS opponents with a few exceptions.
Football Bowl Association Executive Director Nick Carparelli helped bring this idea to the Football Oversight Committee. He told 247Sports on Tuesday the measure is designed to provide maximum flexibility during a season in which conferences are participating in an uneven number of games.
“It’s going to be really hard to compare teams who played seven game versus 11 games,” Carparelli told 247Sports. “Final records are going to look very different this year than they typically do. In addition, conferences have contracts in place with bowl games. What this simply does is allows those contract agreements to be filled.”
The Division I Council will need to approve the recommendation. The group is scheduled to meet on Oct. 13-14.
With the waiver likely to pass, conferences and bowl directors across the country are discussing where on the calendar their bowl games will fall. Some dates like the College Football Playoff, which starts Jan. 1, 2021, will remain static. Other games, however, will likely shift off their initial dates given that the regular season ends the weekend of Dec. 19 for many conferences. That date coincides with the initial start of the 2020-21 bowl season as six games were slated for that Saturday.
Carparelli told 247Sports a bowl schedule will be released in the near future, likely right around the time of the Division I Council meeting.
“You can expect a bowl schedule to come out in the next two to three weeks,” Carparelli said.
Something to track with the 39 remaining bowl games is revenue and how willing programs are to travel to some of the lower-tier bowl games that provide smaller payouts. Sportico reported earlier this week some schools may opt out of a bowl game this year if they’re forced to travel at their own or an increased expense. “The expenses of the four or five days at the bowl and the transportation to the bowl site cost at least $1 million for a team no matter where they go,” Wake Forest athletic director John Currie told Sportico.
