It was December 2016, when Stanford star running back Christian McCaffrey announced that he was skipping the Cardinal’s appearance in the Sun Bowl. He could have blamed it on a rancid enchilada at the Taco Bell across the border in Juarez, but the reason he wanted out sent shock waves throughout college football.
He wanted to prepare for the NFL Draft.
Take a moment to transpose that nine years later and let it sink in: A player who was going to be a high draft pick (McCaffrey was drafted No. 8 overall) decided to skip the Sun Bowl.
The Sun Bowl.
These days, it’s almost as shocking when a future NFL draft pick doesn’t opt out of the Sun Bowl.
Or the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.
Or the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl.
Or just about any bowl.
Indeed, lots has changed in nine years in how college football works. McCaffrey may have fired the first shot and it certainly wasn’t the last.
Has another just been fired? One with perhaps even deeper consequences?
One of the misunderstood factors about Notre Dame’s decision to decline a bowl invitation this week – it was the PopTarts Bowl, so that alone might have been a good enough reason – had far less to do with wanting out of a lower-tier bowl game as it had to do its displeasure in the manner in which the Irish were kneecapped out of the College Football Playoff.
Rest assured, had Notre Dame been on the outside looking in during the weekly rankings (instead of the other way around), it would have been Frosted Confetti Cupcake PopTarts as far as the eye could see for the Irish. Their issue was more about the process than the result.
But there’s collateral damage at play.
Notre Dame wasn’t alone in its move to shut down the 2025 season – the Irish were one of 10 teams to decline – but others could hide under the umbrellas of “coaching instability” and/or the old favorite of “off-season focus.”
Those happen every year.
You have to wonder if there’s another umbrella that Notre Dame just popped open – the team opt-out of anything that isn’t a college football playoff appearance.
It’s tough to be the first; it’s a whole lot easier to be the second. Many forget that LSU’s Leonard Fournette also skipped the Citrus Bowl in the same year that McCaffrey did. (To be fair, Fournette had been bothered by nagging injuries that year.)
Who’s next? Will it happen next year when a team on the fringe of the CFB decides that fielding a ghost of a team isn’t worth having mayonnaise poured on their head coach?
To be sure, NIL and the transfer portal are also new factors in play these days. Laugh if you’d like, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of players opting-out to turn a good team into a non-competitive one. And who wants that?
I’ll tell you who – the conferences do.
That’s another difference for Notre Dame. By not being in a conference, it doesn’t have to answer to the league office. Kansas State and Iowa State also declined this year (coaching change) and still got fined 500Large by the Big 12. (Five zeros.)
It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to look onto the future and hear others using that pre-teen excuse “…but Notre Dame did it!” to start backing out of bowl games.
Or maybe that won’t happen. After all, the bowls have that cockroach-after-nuclear-holocaust way of doing things: You just can’t kill them.
Look no farther than that little affair that goes on between Greenwood Road and I-20 each December. Every time the white sheet might be making an appearance, the Independence Bowl bounces right back.
But it has to be a concern. The word “meaningless” was never used to describe bowl games until McCaffrey opted out in 2016. Now, some games have been described as less significant than the spring game.
Ouch.
With ESPN owning almost all of them, the bowls don’t quite have the same charm as they once did. The days of courting and scouting and hustling to try to get teams to come to your bowl are gone. There’s not a whole lot of selecting by selection committees; they wait for conferences (and the four-letter network) to let you in on their plan.
Adapt or die, as the saying goes.
Maybe the Notre Dame decision is a one-off. But what if it isn’t?
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com