Bill ConnellyDec 13, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseBill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.Follow on X
play1:34’Yeah, boy!’ Flava Flav revealed as mascot during mayo bathFlava Flav is revealed as the celebrity in the mayo mascot uniform as Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck gets doused in mayonnaise.
Heather Dinich has strong words for CFP, Notre Dame after Irish exclusion (0:54)Heather Dinich weighs in on the state of the College Football Playoff system after Notre Dame’s criticism over its exclusion from the field. (0:54)
‘Yeah, boy!’ Flava Flav revealed as mascot during mayo bathFlava Flav is revealed as the celebrity in the mayo mascot uniform as Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck gets doused in mayonnaise.
Flava Flav is revealed as the celebrity in the mayo mascot uniform as Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck gets doused in mayonnaise.
Disappointment Bowls, Part 2 (disappointing 2025 campaigns)
Congratulations, you get to play a service academy!
7-6 sounds much better than 6-7 (and 6-7 sounds better than 5-8)
Some teams will be more excited to be there than others, and some players will opt out, and the show will go on regardless. We’ll soak in the last college football we can get, we’ll see players dump french fries and mayonnaise (in separate bowl games, though that would be delightful together) on victorious coaches, we’ll murder an anthropomorphized Pop-Tart, and we’ll all have a lovely time.
The deader we pretend bowls are, the more entertaining they turn out to be. To prepare you for the silliness, I’m here to lump each bowl game — not including first-round College Football Playoff games, which technically aren’t bowls, or the Fiesta and Peach Bowl semifinals, which don’t have any teams yet — into 13 categories. (Some show up in multiple categories. It’s fine.)
CFP Quarterfinal at the Capital One Orange Bowl: James Madison-Oregon winner vs. No. 4 Texas Tech (Jan. 1)
CFP Quarterfinal at the Rose Bowl Game Presented by Prudential: Alabama-Oklahoma winner vs. No. 1 Indiana (Jan. 1)
I’m not the biggest fan of these bowls basically being used as neutral-site venues for a playoff game. I remember last year’s incredible Arizona State-Texas quarterfinal, for instance, but I had to think for a moment to remember that it was technically also the Peach Bowl. To me that almost dilutes the value of these major bowls.
For all the problems facing this sport at the moment, we could see Indiana winning the Rose Bowl and Texas Tech winning the Orange Bowl, clinching a semifinal appearance against each other and assuring that one of them will play the national title. That’s pretty cool. (Granted, we also could end up with Alabama-Oregon or something far more familiar.)
CFP Quarterfinal at the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic: Miami-Texas A&M winner vs. No. 2 Ohio State Buckeyes (Dec. 31)
I ended up with five different reasons to pick these five games. Boise State-Washington is a pretty fun regional semi-rivalry that tends to produce either fun, tight Boise State wins or statement blowouts from UW. Both the Broncos and Huskies, meanwhile, are young enough to be hoping for big things in 2026, and both could use a positive result as a nice springboard.
Pitt-ECU is just going to be a mess. A wonderful mess. The Panthers and Pirates played two of last season’s wildest bowls — Pitt lost a six-overtime slugfest to Toledo, ECU won a brawl-plagued (or brawl-blessed?) rivalry game over NC State — and they both tend to live right on the line between aggression and a total lack of control. Hell yeah.
Texas-Michigan is, quite simply, a helmet game. I’m a fan of underdogs, and I preach the value of college football socialism as much as anyone, but I’m allowed to enjoy helmet games.
Vandy-Iowa means that the final chapter in the Diego Pavia story will come against a physical and often confusing Iowa defense and a generally underrated Hawkeyes team. This should be a max-effort game from both sides, too.
Granted, the First Team Out of the 2025 CFP, Notre Dame, isn’t playing in the postseason at all. But the likes of BYU, Texas, Vandy, Utah and American Conference title game loser North Texas dealt with their share of disappointment too. Who uses the snub and/or letdowns as fuel, and who’s already punted on the season?
It’s OK to admit it: For some games, the teams, players and coaches are just pawns for other types of entertainment value. Boise State-Washington could be very entertaining on its own, but it’s going to be awash with Rob Gronkowski appearances, too. The same goes for the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl.
‘Yeah, boy!’ Flava Flav revealed as mascot during mayo bath
Either Wake Forest’s Jake Dickert or Mississippi State’s Jeff Lebby will be finding mayonnaise in places he never dreamed of come the morning of Jan. 3. College football!
The transfer portal has redefined what it means to be a first-year coach. Either by choice or by necessity, you can now almost re-craft your entire roster right out of the gate. This goes horribly for some, obviously, but not even including some schools such as Washington State, where the first-year guy has already left, we have a number of first-year success stories looking to keep the positivity going.
People of a certain age (read: mine) will forever remember Prairie View A&M as the school that lost an epic 80 straight games in the 1980s and 1990s. The Panthers have seen successful since then — four SWAC West division titles, two SWAC titles — but now they’ll get their first Celebration Bowl spotlight thanks to last week’s upset of Jackson State in the SWAC title game. And they got here with a first-year coach who could become a very big name soon.
Tremaine Jackson is 50-15 in his short time as a head coach, and in the past two years he has brought Valdosta State to the Division II national title game and won the SWAC with Prairie View. PVAMU will face second-year coach Chennis Berry and SC State, and my SP+ ratings have the game as almost a perfect toss-up. A great game to start bowl season.
I wanted to isolate these two because of underrated bitterness: Jacksonville State and Troy are in-state rivals who will be playing each other in Mobile, Alabama, right in between the two schools. That one should be feisty enough that it almost made my favorite bowls list. Meanwhile, App State and Georgia Southern are former FCS powers that don’t like each other much either, and their first game this season, a 25-23 Eagles win, was great.
At the end of the regular season, there were 15 teams with a weighted average of plus-9 PPG or better. That includes three playoff teams (Texas Tech, Tulane and Miami) and teams such as Wisconsin and Oklahoma State, which finished far short of bowl eligibility. But a few other teams, listed below with their PPG overachievement, could head into the offseason feeling like they have major momentum.
USF and Washington State have already lost their head coaches — man oh man, does Wazzu deserve a period of time with some semblance of stability — but at the very least, FIU, Fresno State and Arizona have a chance to build major offseason positivity.
On the flip side, a few teams limped into bowl season at the end of a run of underachievement. Here are five games featuring teams that hope a bowl will turn bad feelings around. (Three of them already have interim coaches.)
Quite a few teams had to eke out bowl eligibility and will now try to finish above .500. Meanwhile, recent times have brought us something new: a 5-8 record, obviously earned only by teams that sneak into a bowl at 5-7, then lose. Six teams belong to the 5-8 Club — 2016 North Texas, 2019 Army, 2021 Rutgers, 2022 Rice, 2023 Hawai’i and 2024 Louisiana Tech — and three teams will be attempting to avoid the ignominy. Rice will be looking to avoid becoming the first two-time member.
The “Bowls are dead!” chorus is growing louder. Notre Dame opted out after what had to feel like one of the crueler playoff snubs imaginable (non-2023 Florida State edition, anyway). So did Kansas State and Iowa State (who, to be fair, lost their head coaches and had basically taken a bowl trip to Ireland to start the season already). When the Birmingham Bowl was looking for an opponent for Georgia Southern, it had to search pretty deep into the bin of 5-7 teams before finding one willing and able to make the flight. The vibes have certainly been better.
The best way around this problem, however, is when teams such as Indiana or Texas Tech — college football’s greatest usurpers at the moment — are involved. Indiana and Ohio State played in a Big Ten championship game last week that had almost no playoff consequences, but you couldn’t tell that to Indiana fans who desperately wanted to see their team both pull one over on the Buckeyes for the first time since 1988 and win a share of their first Big Ten title (and earn their first Rose Bowl berth) since 1967. The Hoosiers will play — and be favored against — a college football blue blood there, too, be it Oklahoma or Alabama. They will obviously hope to play two more games after this one, but this will still feel like an awfully big deal.
Georgia, meanwhile, will be either playing a Cinderella — if Tulane can avenge a blowout loss to Ole Miss early in 2025 — or facing a rematch of one of the SEC’s best games of 2025. The Dawgs went on a 17-0 run over the final 13 minutes to beat Lane Kiffin’s Rebels 43-35 on Oct. 18. Granted, they’re not Kiffin’s Rebels anymore, and a lot will have changed in two months. But either upstarts will pull upsets in the Cotton and Sugar Bowls, or we’ll get our first Ohio State-Georgia game since their incredible 2022 playoff game in Atlanta.
Ohio State’s Julian Sayin and Jeremiah Smith (and Bo Jackson?), Georgia’s Gunner Stockton, Ole Miss’ Trinidad Chambliss and Kewan Lacy, Miami’s Malachi Toney, Texas A&M’s Marcel Reed and other potential 2026 Heisman candidates will be plying their trade in the CFP. Oregon’s Dante Moore, too, if he doesn’t go pro. But despite being outside of the playoff’s realm, other potential candidates will have a chance to build plenty of 2026 buzz. Can you imagine what will happen if, say, Arch Manning throws for 300-plus on Michigan? You thought this year’s buzz was loud?