In the age of the College Football Playoff, it’s easy to dismiss traditional bowl games as meaningless. Just don’t tell that to the Iowa State Cyclones.

A Pop Tarts Bowl match between Iowa State and the Miami Hurricanes had every reason to turn into a glorified spring game. The Cyclones’ failure in the Big 12 Championship Game and Miami’s Thanksgiving weekend loss at Syracuse denied both teams a spot in the 12-team playoffs, setting the stage for a potentially forgettable bowl game.

Meanwhile, the game itself caught the attention of college football pundits and social media users more for its ridiculous brand placement gimmicks — an edible mascot and a trophy with a built-in toaster — than for its on-field product. The pageantry and history of the Rose Bowl game were not.

Instead, the Cyclones and Hurricanes delivered one of the most exciting games in this first postseason of the expanded playoff era. Iowa State’s 42-41 victory marked the 12th bowl game this year that was decided by a one-point margin.

The program included Navy’s 21-20 Armed Forces Bowl victory over Oklahoma, including Blake Horvath’s record-setting 95-yard touchdown run; Kansas State’s 44-41 loss to Rutgers in the Rate Bowl, highlighted by Dylan Edwards’ 196 rushing yards; and two-, five- and six-overtime marathons in the famed Idaho Potato, Hawai’i and GameAbove Sports Bowls. These games featured more compelling football than any first-round playoff game.

To be fair, expanding the playoffs for the bowl season wasn’t necessary to dilute the postseason. You don’t have to look far through archives to find newspaper columns from the 1980s lamenting the proliferation of bowl games.

More recently, the increasing prevalence of player opt-outs – by those preparing for the NFL Draft – preceded changes to NCAA transfer rules. Post-pandemic bowl games with lineups that barely resemble regular-season rosters are not uncommon.

For Iowa State, however, the Pop-Tarts Bowl provided a backdrop for the Cyclones’ own piece of history – a piece of history largely untouched by such roster moves. With Rocco Becht’s goal-line touchdown carry for his fourth score of the day, Iowa State secured its first 11-win season in the program’s 134-year history.

Cyclones coach Matt Campbell emphasized the significance of this milestone during the bowl’s opening press conference on December 8, saying:
“What really makes Iowa State special is our ability to achieve great resilience. I know our kids are excited about the opportunity to graduate.”

Similarly, it’s easy to reject bowls these days; One might attribute a feeling like Campbell’s to naivety. We live in a brave new college football world dominated by zero money and a flood of transfers in the offseason.

But it turns out that Campbell wasn’t spewing empty rhetoric when Iowa State’s upperclassmen committed to the Pop-Tarts Bowl.

Jaylin Noel’s commitment proved crucial to the win. The senior wide receiver caught eight passes for 117 yards and a game-winning touchdown late in the third quarter, cutting Miami’s 10-point lead to three.

“That meant the world to me, that I could be a leader on this team,” an emotional Noel said of the bowl being his final game against Iowa State. “I had to play for them. These guys come by every day and look up to me. If I didn’t play, it just wouldn’t be what leaders do.”

“It hasn’t hit me yet,” Noel said of the bowl game being his swansong at Iowa State. “I love this team so much. I love Coach (Campbell) for everything he has done for me. And this team means a lot to me. There’s no better way to come out than to become a champion.”

Bowl season means more opportunities to emerge as a champion, whether the trophy is the cylindrical golden prize of the playoffs or a Pop-Tarts Bowl trophy with a toaster on top. It’s part of what has made college football special for generations, and this year’s bowl games suggest that the postseason can retain some of that mystique in this new era.