Bowl season will never be what it once was. On that, we can all agree. The days of every college player being fully involved through his senior-year bowl game are long gone.
But I think it’s also safe to say that fans are weary and frustrated with the player transience of the current age. The bowls now fall smack in the middle of a manic musical chairs game, some players declaring for the portal, others leveraging their loyalty against future NIL compensation and playing time in the bowl.
It’s chaos. And when on Friday morning I asked both coaches involved in Saturday’s Peach Bowl how they keep their players engaged and their teams cohesive in this wild new world, their reactions were notable.
Penn State’s James Franklin was restrained, and his response was measured:
“We were discussing it a little bit last night, to be honest with you. I think that’s the challenge, right? This is new. This is new to all of us, and it’s really changed year-by-year. Transfer portal windows, NIL, I think all these things have changed. So that’s one of the more difficult things.
“In the previous structure, you could kind of rely on past experiences, but this has been a moving target. I think we’re both trying kind of different approaches and trying to figure out what is the best thing for both of our programs. But I think it’s a challenge for everybody right now.”
Mississippi’s Lane Kiffin was decidedly unrestrained. He so much wanted to answer my question that when the Peach Bowl moderator didn’t wait for his response and instead moved on to the next reporter’s question, Kiffin returned to it:
“I’ve been very critical of the calendar, very critical of the system, even though we try to obviously maximize the system. But it’s really not good.
“In talking with a lot of coaches over the last two weeks, there’s been a lot of struggles, and it’s a poor system. You [shouldn’t] have free agency during the season. That [shouldn’t] happen with no parameters around it. And that’s what we’re dealing with.
“Talking to coaches around the country dealing with players coming in, they’re going to opt-out for the game or they’re going to transfer if they don’t play this many plays, or they don’t get this much money.6e
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