Man, even if you take all this NIL/transfer crap out of the equation, it almost feels like the season is such a flash in the pan with the bowl games becoming meaningless. Twelve games per year isn't many. Two or three (in most years) are already played against FCS/G5 competition: Sorry - I just can't get excited for 90% of those games. So you're already down to around ten games. Of those, how many are you excited to play? Like, I didn't really care about GT (I know what happened) or VT going into the games. And I wouldn't have cared much about the last four anyway, because of where expectations were at versus the fact that we were already eliminated from Coastal contention (or thereabouts), but they were especially lulls because they were against mostly awful teams.
I feel like the bowl games used to be something to look forward to, and it kind of helped to mentally prolong what's a pretty short season already. But now? Just seems like it's hardly worth putting in the effort following this stuff just for 9 or 10 P5 games per season, only half of which are really all that interesting.
It'll probably never happen, but I would love to see the season extended a few weeks and the non-playoff bowls fall by the wayside. Like, give everyone an extra bye week and play 14 games or something. And eliminate the FCS game while you're at it, and make it so that P5 teams can only schedule one G5 opponent. Is that fair? I mean, I know we're currently in a player-empowerment phase, but when do the fans - the consumers of the product who make this whole thing tick - get a little bit of a say in this again?