Yet another bowl game has disappeared from college football’s postseason calendar.
The GameAbove Sports Bowl, which has been played annually in Detroit for nearly 30 years, is folding, according to a report from On3 Sports on Tuesday, February 10.
It becomes the third bowl game to cease operations in the past year. The LA Bowl confirmed it was shutting down last month after just five years. The Bahamas Bowl was canceled before the start of the 2025 season and was replaced by the Xbox Bowl in Frisco, Texas.
The GameAbove Sports Bowl was the latest sponsor name for a game that debuted in 1997 as the Motor City Bowl. It was known as the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl from 2009-13 and the Quick Lane Bowl from 2014-23.
The game, which was often played in the days immediately after Christmas, regularly featured a team from the Mid-American Conference going up against a program from either the ACC (which had a tie-in from 2014-19) or the Big Ten (from 2020-25). In what would be the final GameAbove Sports Bowl, Northwestern defeated Central Michigan 34-7.
Though the College Football Playoff has made lower-tier bowl games more nakedly irrelevant, and as those same bowls have increasingly struggled to get bowl-eligible teams to accept invitations, bowl games continue to be a valuable source of inventory for television networks.
ESPN’s broadcasts of the 33 non-College Football Playoff postseason games drew an average viewership of 3.1 million people, up 13% from the previous year. Northwestern’s win against Central Michigan in the final GameAbove Sports Bowl peaked at 2.7 million viewers.
Like many bowls, though, the GameAbove Sports Bowl struggled with attendance in its final years. The 2025 iteration of the game had only 27,857 fans inside 65,000-seat Ford Field, the home stadium of the NFL’s Detroit Lions. The previous year, just 26,219 fans were on hand for Toledo’s thrilling 48-46 win over Pitt in six overtimes.
