For the 2025–26 college football season, there are 47 postseason games: 36 traditional bowl games plus 11 College Football Playoff (CFP) games in the expanded 12‑team format.

Current bowl game count

  • NBC Sports notes that the 2025–26 season features 41 bowl events when counting all postseason contests, including CFP rounds and the national title game.
  • ESPN’s detailed 2025–26 bowl schedule clarifies that this consists of 36 conventional bowls along with 11 CFP games (first round, quarterfinals, semifinals, and the championship), for a total of 47 postseason games.

Why the number looks confusing

  • Many fans and outlets still casually say “around forty bowl games,” because historically only the non‑playoff bowls were counted, and the number has hovered in the low 40s since the mid‑2010s.
  • With the 12‑team CFP, some of those postseason games are technically playoff contests but are played in existing bowl venues, which is why one source might say 41 “bowls” while another lists 36 bowls plus 11 CFP games.

TL;DR: If the question is “how many college football bowl games are there this season?”, the practical answer for 2025–26 is 47 total postseason games , made up of 36 standard bowl games and 11 College Football Playoff games.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.