The College Football Playoff has not devalued bowls because that’s impossible

Alabama football coach Nick Saban seems to think a couple of players’ skipping their bowl game this year is a consequence of the College Football Playoff devaluing other bowls.

That’s probably not correct.

The problem with that conclusion is it requires one to believe the non-BCS Championship Game bowls actually mattered in the previous 16 years before the playoff began.

The fact is, they didn’t. Who wins any bowl but one became irrelevant in 1998, the first year of the BCS.

Prior to that, multiple bowl games often had at least the potential for some impact on the national championship, and anyway everyone’s goals were defined regionally by their conference affiliation so they were more concrete than they are now when, as just one example, some good team from the Big Ten is going to the Rose Bowl every year but it probably won’t be the league champion.

Now even whatever talking points we might take into the offseason from a game like Stanford’s drubbing of Iowa last year or Oklahoma’s upset of Alabama three years ago are quickly forgotten when the following season’s results contradict them.

The bowls overall, including the Rose, Sugar, Orange, Fiesta and Cotton when they are not hosting semifinals, have been diminished over the years, but that is not because of the playoff.

Blame the BCS, and blame the massive increase in number of bowls.

RELATED: What kinds of gifts are bowls giving out this year?

Also don’t ignore the creep from almost every game being played on Jan. 1 to the creation of “bowl week” to a full month of postseason exhibitions. That changed the overall perception of the games significantly in the past 20 years.

Of course, none of this likely has anything to do with Christian McCaffrey and Leonard Fournette (who is dealing with an injury) opting not to play in their bowl games.

That is almost certainly a product of Jaylon Smith’s severe knee injury against Ohio State in last year’s Fiesta Bowl, a game with great prestige but still no practical meaning.

Prior to the Notre Dame linebacker going down, the specter of a serious injury always hung over games. It lingered around the periphery of the talk about them, but it happened so rarely it hardly seemed real.

And even those players who did get hurt – including Miami’s Willis McGahee, Ohio State’s Ted Ginn Jr. and current Bengal Cedric Ogbuehi, then of Texas A&M – were still first-round picks.

Ogbuehi struggled in his first full year as a starter, but McGahee and Ginn went on to long NFL careers (Ginn’s is still ongoing).

RELATED: Ogbuehi says, ‘I wouldn’t have even thought about not playing’

Smith, who tweeted he would still decide to play if he had a do-over, may yet become a star, but he already lost millions by sliding to the second round of the draft last spring.

It remains to be seen what kind of player he will be when he does take the field again.

One thing that is certain: Who wins almost any bowl game still won’t matter.

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