The Notre Dame football team made news on Sunday by being excluded from the College Football Playoff, most centrally in favor of Alabama but also Miami. The Fighting Irish then made additional news on Sunday by refusing any invitation to a bowl game, ending their 2025 college football season.

This piece of news will generate a lot of discussion about the viability and sustainability of the bowl system in a 12-team College Football Playoff era. The expectation of a playoff berth is so strong and all-encompassing at various top programs that a failure to make the playoff might continue to lead top names in the sport to turn down second-tier bowl invitations should they miss the CFP. Let's dive more into this discussion:

The tweet

The bowl that won't be

The Notre Dame bowl game which was viewed as a possibility was a Pop-Tarts Bowl meeting with BYU, another team snubbed by the playoff committee. That would have been a quality bowl matchup, but now it won't happen.

Other bowl opt-outs

Kansas State and Iowa State have opted out of their bowl games. Notre Dame makes three teams opting out of bowl games.

Accelerating pace

It used to be -- just a few years ago -- that "opting out" of a bowl game referred to players who wanted to preserve NFL draft stock. Now opting out is a team thing, pointing to exhaustion but also the satisfactions of NIL money. Why go through the extra trouble to play a second- or third-tier bowl game? Why deal with coaching changes, as Kansas State and Iowa State had to face? This is weakening the bowl system. How much is the real question.

Coaching calendar

The Kansas State and Iowa State opt-outs, occurring in connection with coaching changes, reinforce the point that December being the month for coaching changes gets in the way of bowl games. If college football could reserve January as the month for any and all coaching transactions, some of these opt-outs could be avoided.

Back to Notre Dame

We have covered the bowl opt-out portion of this story. Now look at what Notre Dame has done administratively and contractually for future college football seasons:

Back to the past

Notre Dame did not accept bowl invitations for decades. The Irish played in the 1925 Rose Bowl against Stanford, then not again until the 1970 Cotton Bowl against Texas. In 1996, Notre Dame went 8-3 but turned down a bowl bid. This is hardly a new thing for Notre Dame.

Bowl games and the future of college football

The BCS made it so that teams which did not make the BCS title game had to "settle" for the Rose Bowl or the other non-BCS championship games. The four-team playoff made it so that teams outside the final four were settling for lesser bowls. The 12-team playoff has expanded that circle of postseason games. It's not going to happen, but a 1985-style bowl system with playoff games played after the traditional 1985-style setup would be a great way to bring back an old-time college football flavor while still crowning a national champion in a playoff-like manner.

Bowl games still do well on TV

College football drew lots of eyeballs this season. ESPN's SEC partnership was an unqualified success. Big games drew over 10 million viewers. The bowls are popular holiday inventory on TV. The weakness of the bowl system is visible, but many strong points are still sustaining it. We will have to see where we are in a few years before declaring the bowls dead, but reforms of various kinds could really freshen up this flawed format.

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This article originally appeared on College Sports Wire: Notre Dame decision raises questions about future of bowl games

Reporting by Matt Zemek, College Sports Wire / College Sports Wire

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