College Football Bowl Games To Begin Offering NIL Incentives To Prevent Opt Outs

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While the world of NIL has caused a number of problems in college football, it may also offer the solution to one of the sport’s biggest current problems: bowl game opt-outs.

Bowl season used to be a wonderful, magical time. But in the last decade, more and more players have opted not to play bowl games that aren’t part of the College Football Playoff in order to protect their health and, subsequently, their draft stock.

But now bowl games are gearing up to offer NIL contracts in hopes of convincing more players to actually take part in the game.

The 2024 Arizona Bowl, which is set to be sponsored by Snoop Dogg, recently announced its plan to offer NIL deals to players.

Nick Carparelli, the executive director of Bowl Season, which oversees more than 40 bowl games each year, recently told Front Office Sports that more bowls could well follow suit.

“That’s a decision that’s up to each individual bowl game,” Carparelli said. “But I think we would all be naive to think that that’s not right around the corner for everybody.”

The hardest hit bowls have been legacy games — such as the Alamo Bowl, Holiday Bowl and Capital One Bowl — that feature big-name teams and players who likely just missed out on the College Football Playoff.

Now those games have another option.

“Any payments to student-athletes for participation in bowl games would need to be a shared initiative between the bowls, the conferences, and the institutions themselves,” Carparelli said. “If the conferences and the universities were to tell the bowl games, ‘Hey, we would like these payments to go directly to the student-athletes through NIL,’ then that would be very easy for the bowl games to execute.”

Would conferences do that? Only time will tell. But it appears as if it’s the most logical way to save what was once the best part of the college football season.