If you are a fan of the college football bowl season, there’s some good news and some bad news.

We’re right in the middle of the bowl schedule, with the sport’s second round of playoffs set for later this week, and some pretty good matchups filling up some of the other slots.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that as the College Football Playoff expands — a move that could come again as soon as next season — the bowl system as we have come to know it will look a whole lot different.

Bowl games have certainly come a long way since they were first played in the early 1900s. They served as a reward for a good season, and as a way to provide games that fans would otherwise likely not get to see, a chance for the powerhouse teams from the east and midwest to take on the best teams from the south and west.

They also served as a way to attract tourists — why spend the New Year holiday in the cold and snowy eastern part of the United States when a trip to watch your favorite team play in sunny Southern California or Southern Florida was just a train trip, or as time passed, a simple flight away?

That’s all changed — no longer is an Ohio State vs. UCLA contest something that would only happen in a Rose Bowl game — it’s nothing more than a regular-season game in the Big Ten. And Pitt vs. Stanford? While once a matchup you could see only during bowl season, that’s just another regular game on the Atlantic Coast Conference schedule.

Conference expansion; name, image and likeness money; the transfer portal; the ease with which all college games can be viewed on over-the-air television, cable or through streaming services; and the availability of widespread gambling already have changed the sport forever. When the CFP grows, and more bowl games are incorporated into the system, there will be fewer spots available under the traditional bowl format, and the likelihood that a growing number of teams that do not get a playoff spot will opt out of the post-season entirely.

That happened this year, when Iowa State, Kansas State and Notre Dame decided to pass on the bowl games.

Before their decisions, there were 82 teams that were eligible to play in the 41 bowl games. That meant officials had to scramble to find teams that finished with 5-7 records to fill the empty spots, which made the bowls where those teams landed even less attractive.

Notre Dame’s decision to sit out the post-season came after it was bypassed for a spot in the CFP, not because it was not one of the top teams in the country, but because of the complicated system the selection committee used to make its determinations. Some of the elements of that system, it seems, had little to do with the game on the field.

And, with the first round of the playoffs behind us, it appears that the question that should have been asked was not which two of these three teams — Notre Dame, Alabama and Miami — would get left out of the tournament, but, rather, why any of them should have been bypassed while James Madison and Tulane were given berths. That appeasement of the lower-tier teams will need to be addressed in the coming year.

For teams in our region, the bowl season opened Tuesday, when Ohio University defeated UNLV 17-10 in the Scooter’s Coffee Frisco Bowl.

Ohio State, meanwhile, earned a bye from the first round of the CFB and will meet Miami at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Goodyear Cotton Bowl in Arlington, Texas. The Hurricanes advanced with a 10-3 win over Texas A&M in an opening-round game.

On Dec. 27, Pitt will take on East Carolina in the Go Bowling Military Bowl in Annapolis, Md., at 11 a.m., and Penn State will meet Clemson in the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl in Yankee Stadium at noon.

The CFP semifinals will be played Jan. 8 and Jan. 9, with the championship game set for 7:30 p.m. Jan. 19 at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium.

Despite all of the changes, the sport has endured, there remains a special connection among college football, its fans and the end of one year and the beginning of the next.

Sit back and enjoy the games.