I stand by my belief that in a vacuum a million bowls is a non-issue, but it's impact on the regular season is not.
Between it being so easy to qualify and abolishing the selection order within the conferences, it's made a ton of the regular season meaningless. Every win from like 6 to 9 has no impact on anything.
Interesting, I find myself on the other side of it, but because I think the death of the selection order was in a way liberating.
It's probably because UW went to Florida six years in a row from 2004-2009, Orlando four times, and then went back Orlando and Tampa again in 2013-14. I got really tired of being a certain level of good meaning more Florida, more New Year's morning, more upper-but-not-top tier SEC (or middling ACC). I wanted something different. But to get something different meant getting worse.
On the 6-9 not having impact, I still think CFB is great because every different level of win would elicit a different feeling. In the old system, I watched 7 and 9 win UW teams go to the Russell Athletic Bowl, and each journey felt very different. On the other hand, if you cut bowls you have more teams not looking forward to anything after the season. And I can imagine games at the end of a season with no bowl feel far more meaningless than sitting at 6-3 and imagining 8 or 9.
(Forgive this tangent, but I kinda started thinking about this)
The weirdest part about bowl proliferation isn't so much that it impacted what used to be 6-5 teams (though the 12-game schedule flattened out that middle). If you look back, P5 teams at 6-5 were still going bowling about half the time. Most 7-4 teams were, and usually when they didn't it was because they lacked the brand.
The biggest difference has been the expansion of G5 franchise. Now there were plenty of G5 (or equivalent) teams reasonably left out, and some weirdly left out. If you were BYU or Air Force, you could often get an invite. Hawaii would because it had a home bowl. But you had 10-1 Toledo, 10-2 Wyoming or Meyer's 8- and 9-win BG teams left home. This helps them, and the ilk below them.
But what this has created is a bowl arrangement that's still highly segregated, and I get why. P5 teams don't want to earn a spot with a good season and then get a G5 team. It just feels weird. So the only crossover is in bad bowls, 6-6 P5 vs. 7-5 G5 or whatnot. I wish they would tinker with things slightly. Good G5 Buffalo and good G5 Troy faced off, and sad UW and sad Miami will play. If you mixed those matchups at all, maybe interesting.
