The 2010–11 NCAA football bowl games concluded the 2010 NCAA Division I FBS football season and included 35 team-competitive bowl games and four all-star games. The games began play with three bowls on December 18, 2010 and included the 2011 BCS National Championship Game in Glendale, Arizona played on January 10 at the University of Phoenix Stadium. The bowl season concluded with the East–West Shrine Game, the Eastham Energy All-Star Game, the Senior Bowl, the Dixie Gridiron Classic, and the NFLPA Game. One bowl, the Toronto-based International Bowl, has ceased operations.
A new record of 35 team-competitive bowls, plus five all-star games, were played, including the inaugural TicketCity Bowl and Pinstripe Bowl (the International Bowl was dropped from the schedule this season). While bowl games had been the purview of only the very best teams for nearly a century, this was the fifth consecutive year that teams with non-winning seasons participated in bowl games. To fill the 70 available team-competitive bowl slots, a new record total of 14 teams (20% of all participants) with non-winning seasons participated in bowl games—all 14 had a .500 (6-6) season.
Selection of the teams
In a significant change from the 2009–10 bowl cycle, the NCAA scrapped a bylaw which mandated that a school with a record of 6–6 in regular season play was eligible only if conferences could not fill out available positions for bowl games with teams possessing seven (or more) wins (excluding games played in Hawaii and conference championship games in the ACC, Big 12, Conference USA, Mid-American Conference and the SEC). An example was in 2008 when the Big Ten, the Big 12 and SEC each had two teams selected for the Bowl Championship Series games – Ohio State and Penn State from the Big Ten, Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12 and Alabama and Florida from the SEC. With each conference sending two teams to the BCS, these three conferences forfeited several bowl game slots due to a lack of teams with a winning record.
This change in policy ultimately led to Temple—a team that went 8–4 in the regular season, including a win over Big East BCS representative UConn—going uninvited.
On June 10, Southern California was declared ineligible for two years as a result of the eligibility of Reggie Bush from 2003 through 2005. While the program is appealing their 2011–12 eligibility, they have decided to accept the penalty for this season, snapping a nine-season streak of bowl appearances.