Welcome to Bowl Season. The 2025-26 college football postseason is the second of the 12-team College Football Playoff era. This year, there will be four first-round games before the quarterfinals, semifinals and College Football Playoff championship game on Jan. 19.

But you can’t have a bowl game without two teams that actually want to play in it. Perhaps Notre Dame will prove to be a one-off. Or perhaps the Irish just pulled the team-level equivalent of McCaffrey’s trendsetting move nearly a decade ago. The bowls survived player opt-outs. They will not survive a lack of interested schools.