The bowl panorama seems to be rapidly consolidating.
According to On3, the GameAbove Sports Bowl has been canceled. The Detroit-based game was performed at Ford Field and had existed in its present type since 2014 when the then-Quick Lane Bowl succeeded the Little Caesar’s Bowl.
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Northwestern received this season’s GameAbove Sports Bowl 34-7 over Central Michigan. The game was the primary of three bowls held on Friday, Dec. 26. Two years in the past, the bowl was one of the vital entertaining of bowl season as Toledo beat Pitt 48-46 in six overtimes.
The bowl had just lately featured Big Ten and MAC groups after ACC groups recurrently made appearances in the 2010s. Quick Lane was the sponsor from 2014-23.
The reported disappearance of the GameAbove Sports Bowl would be the third cancellation of a bowl game in the final 12 months. The Bahamas Bowl was not performed on the finish of the 2025 season and changed by the Xbox Bowl in Frisco, Texas. The LA Bowl recently announced that it would no longer be played after it existed for five seasons.
Bowl video games proceed to get sturdy tv scores; ESPN had one of its best seasons for non-playoff bowls viewership. There will all the time be a marketplace for bowl video games outdoors the College Football Playoff. But it’s additionally honest to marvel if the bowl market was too saturated, particularly given what occurred on the finish of the 2025 season with the necessity to fill 36 non-playoff bowl video games.
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Teams like Notre Dame, Iowa State and Kansas State turned down bowl bids after both lacking the playoff (in the case of the Fighting Irish) or dropping a coach to one other staff. That led bowls to scramble for 5-7 groups as replacements, and lots of 5-7 groups turned down the chance to play in yet one more game given the roster turnover that’s now prevalent with the NCAA’s present switch guidelines.
Will extra video games get canceled earlier than the beginning of the 2026 season? We wouldn’t be stunned if one or two extra had been discontinued.