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Houston has a couple of very wealthy boosters, it's possible they could make some moves at some point.

Rice is an academic institution with very little concern about athletics.  They fielded an excellent baseball team for a while with a generational head coach who knew how to develop talent.  Their football team will never be good.

That's interesting to me. It felt to me, in the moment, like it was sucking the air out of the room to around the same degree as the playoff is.

But that may have something to do with my own experience/age at the time/outlook.

Ahh sure, it did feel like that a little bit to me at the time...

But now we have the perspective of hindsight in a 12-team playoff where we're discussing whether teams like Indiana or SMU should go, or whether a 3-loss Alabama team should get an at-large bid over them. 

Back in those days it was limited to undefeated P4 and one-loss helmet teams, and the occasional debate over whether an undefeated G5 program should get a shot (that we all knew they'd never get). 

It seems in retrospect to be a BIG difference in scale. 

That would have been fine.

I know a lot of people (such as OAM) make a big deal out of this... That somehow the sport, or at least the "premier" bowls, are made worse by the mere existence of lesser bowls.

IMHO bowl proliferation does have some problems (such as the lesser bowls essentially forcing the schools into buying expensive ticket allotments they can't sell enough of to recoup it). And yes, they ARE meaningless to anyone except the fans of the schools invited and to degenerate gamblers.

But I think they were still fun for the fans, and for the players, and IMHO their existence didn't harm the other bowls. Purdue had a middling year in 2018, but they got to go to the chicken bowl in Santa Clara. Given that I'm "local-ish", my wife and I flew up for it, got GREAT seats in the 6th row, and had a blast. It was Dec 27 or 28 or something, so it's not like it was conflicting with the major bowls. And for anyone who had nothing better to do and turned on ESPN that night, it was a back and forth game against Arizona and a wild exciting finish.

IMHO--and I've said this extensively--it's a 12-team CFP sucking all the air out of the room that has made the bowls meaningless... Not bowl proliferation.

I think the "lesser" bowls suffered from multiple issues, even before the current opt out/portal issues.  First, we went from NC + 3, to NC +4, to CFP + 4.  So that group grew and grew.  But I actually think flexing the tie ins hurt it more.

I remember MSU played PSU in the final game in 2008.  If MSU won, and OSU subsequently lost to UM, MSU would go to the Rose Bowl, but I was already stoked that MSU was playing in, at worst, the Outback Bowl.  Simply playing in a NYD Bowl was a meaningful thing.  They wound up losing to Georgia in the Citrus Bowl.  But the NC was a pipe dream.  Finishing top 3 in the Big Ten, and getting that NYD bowl validation was a legitimate point of pride.  Starting in 2014 the Big Ten entered into all of these stupid rules to move teams around.  MSU has had 3 great teams since their CFP appearance, 2015, 2017, 2021.  2015 and 2017 qualified for NY6 Bowls.  2017 went to the Holiday Bowl against Washington State based on those weird agreements, even though they won 10 games and finished 3rd.  Based on the rules about repeat appearances, if the 2022 MSU team had actually beaten Indiana and gotten to 6-6, they would have been almost guaranteed the Citrus Bowl, because they were the only eligible team that hadn't been there.  It wasn't the proliferation of bowls, because mostly those just added more shitty G5 teams, but they made it so the bowls between P5 teams were no longer related to having a great season

It's going to happen, probably sooner rather than later.  It's the nature of a post-season tournament. 

I think it's a fun transition year.  You see Michigan fans calling out that loss.  For better, or worse (I think worse), that's just going to be a normal thing.  Imagine Duke winning the basketball tournament, and UNC fans saying they beat them.  That hasn't been a thing for generations.  But we are on a weird cusp in football.

Much simpler than that.  Television revenues.  Neither the SWC nor the Big 8 could survive on their own.  Even after the merger the B12 was still behind the B1G and, later, the SEC.

I've always thought the mistake was that effectively it wasn't a "merger", it was the Big8 grabbing the top-4 SWC programs.  What they SHOULD have done, IMHO, was to get rid of more of the weaklings and create one conference of the strongest from each.  They needed to drop second schools in Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma.  

Yeah, my problem with the BCS was the big, fat lie with the computer rankings.  From the get-go, they never incorporated the computer rankings as-is.  It was always an altered version, which then got tweaked basically every year, preventing any continuity.

Why bother with the computers if you're not going to incorporate them as-is.  They're already at their top effort, unedited.  So you go an edit them?  WTF???

I understood the concern and didn't mind them meddling but the way that they meddled was a disaster. 

For anyone not familiar there were two concerns, one stated out loud and the other silent:

IMHO there was one major problem with incorporating computer rankings. 

• The impetus for incorporating them was to include an objective, metric-based system that wasn't influenced by the subjective "eye test" and simple "# of losses" biases that the pollsters had. 
• The impetus for changing / tweaking / meddling with them every year is that they didn't agree with the subjective "eye test" and simple "# of losses" biases that the pollsters had, so the computers must therefore be "wrong". 

The system was ALWAYS subjective. It was ALWAYS a beauty pageant. 

So when some unthinking, unfeeling computer that can't recognize "true" beauty starts coming up with different answers than the beauty pageant judges, it must be excluded.