The bottom line is that they are making money. If they weren't, they wouldn't be around. If ESPN wasn't making money off of televising those bowls (directly or indirectly) then they wouldn't be showing them.
It's a shame that bowls don't mean what they used to. Teams like Rutgers are quickly starting to build a "history" of going to bowl games when in reality, it means next to nothing. Let's just call it like it is... if your aren't in a BCS bowl or a championship game, it means little. There are some really nice matchups outside of the BCS (like when we played LSU in the Capital One Bowl a couple years ago), but they kind of get caught up in the wash of the dreck. I think fans are smart enough to know what non-BCS bowls "matter" and which ones don't.
There isn't a school out there that wants less games. Less games = less money. It would never happen in today's college football.
I don't want to highjack the thread and continue, but a 9 game regular season schedule, in my "new world", does not mean schools only need to play 9 games.
After the 9 games are over they can play schools that didn't make the tourney or the season can be a build up to the playoff.
Each of the bowls so far that I have seen