The Bowl Glut

We’ve finally made it to the last football game of the 2010 season, The Super Bowl. It’s rather pathetic that we dragged it into the second month of 2011. The season used to last from around Christmas to about January 3rd, depending on which day the New Year fell. Only college football teams played in bowl games, and there we’re only a handful of them.

In case you haven’t taken the time to count the number of college bowl games, I have, and I can report that there were 35 of them. That means that 70 college football teams—along with their fans—traveled to some southern clime (sometimes) for about three days.

The students who attended let their parents foot the bill, but I suppose that is fairly cheap compared to the tuition and expenses paid to attend the college or university.

The southern clime used to be the rule for bowl games, but now that there are covered stadiums there could be a bowl played in Detroit, or Minneapolis, or even Indianapolis. Well, Minneapolis’ domed stadium is out of commission for a while after the heavy snow tore a huge hole in the roof, but you know what I mean. One of the bowls was played in Boise, Idaho—the open stadium with the dark blue turf—and that definitely is not a tropical paradise in December or any other time of the year.

About winning and losing... I actually did watch several of the games, at least through the first half. The trouble with a lot of them was that by the end of the first quarter, the game was already a blowout. Who, other than the diehard fan, cares to watch a game that ends with a score of 70-0?

When you have 70 teams in the bowls, some are genuine first-class winners, and some are a little suspect. Let’s face it, teams with any more than 2 losses in their season do not belong in a bowl game, but there aren’t 70 teams that can qualify with that record.

For years there was a cry for a college championship game, similar to the pro football Super Bowl to determine the REAL number 1 college team in the country. We finally got our wish a few years ago, and this year’s BCS Championship Game did seem to host the two teams that really deserved to be there – Auburn and Oregon. That game was played on a Monday night in Glendale, Arizona.

I watched the Tostitos BCS Championship up to the end of the third quarter and then set my DVR to record the end and went to bed. I got up Tuesday morning and watched the final quarter, though I had already inadvertently learned that Auburn had won. It was kind of strange that the game was actually won on a fluke play. That game was the only one that was even exciting to watch, and defense was a key factor for both teams.

Personally, I think that way too many teams get into playoffs in all sports, but that is just my opinion. Not many people agree, since playoffs are expanding all the time. Maybe it just goes along with the progressive mindset that “Everybody who plays the game is a winner.”