The bowl landscape appears to be quickly consolidating.
According to On3, the GameAbove Sports Bowl has been canceled. The Detroit-based game was played at Ford Field and had existed in its current form since 2014 when the then-Quick Lane Bowl succeeded the Little Caesar’s Bowl.
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Northwestern won his season’s GameAbove Sports Bowl 34-7 over Central Michigan. The game was the first of three bowls held on Friday, Dec. 26. Two years ago, the bowl was one of the most entertaining of bowl season as Toledo beat Pitt 48-46 in six overtimes.
The bowl had recently featured Big Ten and MAC teams after ACC teams regularly made appearances in the 2010s. Quick Lane was the sponsor from 2014 through 2023.
The reported disappearance of the GameAbove Sports Bowl would be the third cancellation of a bowl game in the last 12 months. The Bahamas Bowl was not played at the end of the 2025 season and replaced 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 games continue to get strong television ratings; ESPN had one of its best seasons for non-playoff bowls viewership. There will always be a market for bowl games outside the College Football Playoff. But it’s also fair to wonder if the bowl market was too saturated, especially given what happened at the end of the 2025 season with the need to fill 36 non-playoff bowl games.
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Teams like Notre Dame, Iowa State and Kansas State turned down bowl bids after either missing the playoff (in the case of the Fighting Irish) or losing a coach to another team. That led bowls to scramble for 5-7 teams as replacements, and many 5-7 teams turned down the opportunity to play in one more game given the roster turnover that’s now prevalent with the NCAA’s current transfer rules.
Will more games get canceled before the start of the 2026 season? We wouldn’t be surprised if one or two more were discontinued.
