2015–16 NCAA football bowl games
The 2015–16 NCAA football bowl games were a series of college football bowl games. They completed the 2015 NCAA Division I FBS football season. The games began on December 19, 2015 and, aside from the all-star games, ended with the 2016 College Football Playoff National Championship which was played on January 11, 2016.
| 2015–16 NCAA football bowl games | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Season | 2015 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Regular season | September 3, 2015 – December 12, 2015 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Number of bowls | 42 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| All-star games | 4 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bowl games | December 19, 2015 – January 11, 2016 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| National Championship | 2016 College Football Playoff National Championship | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Location of Championship | University of Phoenix Stadium Glendale, AZ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Champions | Alabama Crimson Tide | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bowl Challenge Cup winner | SEC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A new record total of 41 team-competitive bowl games were played in FBS, including the national championship game and the inaugural Cure Bowl and Arizona Bowl. While bowl games had been the purview of only the very best teams for nearly a century, this was the tenth consecutive year that teams with non-winning seasons were bowl-eligible and participated in bowl games. To fill the 80 available team-competitive bowl slots, a new record 15 teams (19% of all participants) with non-winning seasons participated in bowl games—12 had a .500 (6–6) season and, for another new record, three had a sub-.500 season. Those three teams each had 5–7 seasons, sharing a new record for the most regular season losses by a bowl team, which had previously been six. This situation led directly to the NCAA Division I Council imposing a three-year moratorium on new bowl games in April 2016.