Mike Organ, Nashville Tennessean Thu, October 29, 2026 at 10:06 AM UTC · 4 min read About Our Ads Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The future of the Liberty Mutual Music City Bowl after the 2026 college football season is uncertain.
When the College Football Playoff expanded from 12 to 24 teams, the traditional bowl system was left behind, forcing non-CFP bowls, including the Music City Bowl , to scramble to find ways to survive.
"Certainly, the bowl system, the whole postseason, has gone into a complete overhaul," said Music City Bowl president and CEO Scott Ramsey, who isn't ready to throw in the towel on the game played annually at Nissan Stadium around New Year's, but knows he faces an uphill battle. "Right now we're trying to work through what the options are."
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The expanded playoff format will pull 12 likely Power Four teams out of the traditional bowl system, with the first two rounds expected to be played on campus sites and the New Year's Six bowls hosting the quarterfinals and semifinals.
The Music City Bowl's agreements with the SEC, Big Ten and ESPN, along with other bowls' conference tie-ins, expired in 2025. However, because discussions about expanding the CFP to 12 teams began while those agreements were still in effect, the NCAA asked the bowls to extend their contracts through 2026.
"This year is our one-year extension as they work through that 24-team negotiation, which they've pretty much completed," Ramsey said. "With that, they said we don't know what we want outside of that 24 yet. So that's where we are."
The 2026 Music City Bowl will be played on Dec. 30 (2 p.m. CT, ESPN ).
Ramsey joined executives from several other bowls with Power Four conference tie-ins that are not part of the playoff for a meeting in Irving, Texas, last week to discuss their futures.
The hope is that conference leaders will want some bowl games to survive, giving teams that miss the 24-team playoff another postseason opportunity. Those spots would likely go to bowls that have remained relevant since the CFP began. For the Music City Bowl, that could be a best-case scenario, given its ability to draw large crowds — averaging 51,621 fans over the past five years — and generate solid television ratings
Ramsey is also counting on the Music City Bowl's longstanding relationship with the SEC to help it navigate this new era. The SEC has been represented in every Music City Bowl since the game debuted in 1998, when it was played at Vanderbilt.
"You've got to have what, two teams and a broadcast partner to make this thing work?" Ramsey said. "What's the whole postseason look like for the SEC? They've got to have that discussion in the SEC. If they say, 'Hey, we really want to have some bowl game outside of the playoff,' I think that's what the answer is going to be. Then, 'Who do we want to play, where do we want to play?' Then start putting that model together."
If the Music City Bowl survives into the new era, its role in working with conferences to arrange matchups will be reversed.
"It's a little backward from before when we were, I would say, the aggressor," Ramsey said. "We were like, we know what we've got, we know our contract ends here, we'd like to move up, we'd like to have this pick, we'd like to have this game. Now, I think we're in the wait-and-see what (the conferences) want to do because they're the ones driving kind of the change. I like the position we're in; I just don't have any idea what those models look like."
Ramsey said now that the 24-team playoff is finalized, he can start working on the future.
"We can start talking to our partners, the SEC, the Big Ten and ESPN about what it looks like," Ramsey said. "Outside of that, we're just in kind of a waiting game. I feel like there will be some games that are going to want to play because not every team is going to make it."
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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: What we're hearing about future of Music City Bowl with CFP expansion after 2026 season
Source: Sports
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