Speaking of bowl invites, there was a bad football game on Super Nintendo back in the day called Super Play-Action football.
It was unique in that it had NFL, college, and high school levels to play.
I've mentioned it before, as without college licensing, it was creative with the school names: South Bend instead of ND, Pursue instead of Purdue, Smart Mouth instead of Dartmouth, etc.
It featured a diagonal look at the field, so much of the area you wanted to run to and all of your pass-catchers were off-screen and largely a mystery.
A long TD run would take upwards of 30 seconds. But it had college teams and actual option plays, so I played the hell out of it.
SO ANYWAYS, when you had a good season, the bowl invites would start rolling in. It did a great job of the lower bowls offering first, building up to the big ones at the end of the season. And if you played season after season, you'd really focus on the matchup in the bowl and if you'd been to one 2-3-4 seasons in a row, you'd accept a different bowl invite just for the sake of variety.
I'm 99% sure that some of those OU and Nebraska teams that kept going to the Orange Bowl year after year would have enjoyed some variety.