Best-ever package on corrupt aspect of bowl games

With the expansion to the 12-game schedule and the gradually increasing willingness of teams to schedule tough opponents, this becomes less and less significant. Which Georgia Dome game was more compelling: Alabama-Clemson or LSU-Ga. Tech? Which game would you rather watch: Ohio State-USC or Virginia Tech-Cincinnati? And VT-Cincy is a BCS game. Hell, I'm not sure it's more compelling than Central Michigan-Florida Atlantic, another of those marquee matchups we just can't do without.

Not to mention that the tie-ins mean that you're only going to get certain sets of matchups anyway. I can wish until I'm blue in the face for a Rose Bowl between, say, USC and Florida, but I'm not getting it because of "tradition." Or to use a tired example, we could have had USC-Georgia last year, but because of "tradition," we ended up with USC-Illinois and Georgia-Hawaii.

 

Exactly what I've always thought.

Have your eight- or 16-team tournament for the national crown and let the rest of the flotsam and jetsam play in the ButtPlug.com Bowl in Walla Walla.

 

Growing up in the 70s there were just a handful of bowls: The Rose, Cotton, Sugar, Orange, Sun, Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl, Peach Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, Tangerine Bowl, Liberty Bowl and the Gator Bowl. It was a big deal when the Hall of Fame Bowl, the Independence Bowl and the Holiday Bowl started up in the late 70s. That's 28 teams that could get a bowl - deals were made in early November to lock up certain schools. Some top teams (especially in the West) were shut out of bowls because organizers didn't think their fans would travel so new bowls were formed (which helped launch the Holiday and propel the Fiesta Bowl to New Years Day). Most of the non-New Years games were on Misslou with a young Howard David doing play-by-play. But once every conference formed a bowl for its champion (the MAC-Big West Raisin, the Sunbelt New Orleans) it just got silly.
But back then, teams didn't travel very far in the non-conference games so you didn't see a team from one major conference play another team from a major conference very often. I could only imagine how high the ratings for the bowls would be if there were only 15. I was amazed how far down in the Sagarin ratings I had to go to find some of these bowl teams. Fla. Atlantic was ranked 114! Memphis 100! The only way the present system would make sense is if the school presidents also advocated for anyone who kept showing up, went to class and turned in all the homework would be welcome to attend their schools. You have to draw a line somewhere.

 

California Raisin Bowl! Good times with that one.

It inevitably featured 6-5 Northern Illinois vs. 6-4-1 San Jose State.

 

HEY!!!!

 

I can only vouch for Boise and Albuquerque, but the problem is that most of these bowls opt for teams with fans that probably already have been the lower-tier bowl cities. I'm sure there are a lot of teams from the West that would enjoy a trip to the Liberty Bowl in Memphis or the Music City Bowl in Nashville.

 

Mark my words. One day college football will come to its senses and there will be a playoff system in place and we'll all look back at these bowl games with the same expressions on our face that we have every time we think of how they used to vote for a national champion.

 

It's freakin' December in Canada. Ten-below, anyone?

 

Uh, they still do vote for mythical national champions. Ask the AP.

 

1) I liked how they used to vote for the national championship.
2) The playoff is not going to happen unless the NCAA is involved, and that means every conference, too. Boy, what fun that will be.
3) It will make this sport more corrupt, not less.

 

Those stories are interesting and all, but what I still don't see is why having the NCAA's paws all over a playoff would be any better financially, or even aesthetically.

The first assumption is that a playoff would lead to more interest and ratings. I'm not sure that's so. The NCAA hoops tournament is as big as it is because of, let's face it, gambling. Every schlub has a bracket. So is that going to happen with football? Heck, there are already a million bowl pools, and it's not like football has any problem attracting gamblers.

Also, for the biggest games, the stadiums are full and the ratings are likely as high as they would be in a playoff. The argument is that you don't need the lesser games because of low interest. But as these articles point out, coaches and programs love them because they bring extra practice and more exposure to schools that would otherwise not get either in the course of a playoff season.

Also, big schools and conferences are going to hoard playoff money just like they hoard BCS money. In NCAA hoops, the share of proceeds is divided based on number of teams in each conference that have made it, and how far they go. It would probably be similar in a football playoff. So it's not like the Sun Belt is going to have a windfall from playoff money.

And is not the NCAA also capable of spending money on stupid stuff like miniature golf tournaments? I guess you can argue at least some schools wouldn't lose money going to stupid bowls, but, again, the schools see this as the price of exposure. Boise State doesn't become Boise State unless it can build itself up, bowl by bowl.

I admire the effort in putting this together, but to me the argument for a playoff system is only about one thing -- how important it is to have a clear-cut, decided-on-the-field champion. The money arguments just don't cut it. I'm sure a lot of schools have run the numbers, and they know they're much better off under the bowl system than a playoff system, especially considering that football is the revenue sport with a capital R. It's like why Notre Dame football doesn't join a conference. Until it is better off financially doing so, it's going to remain independent.

 

I'm so tired of self-important pinheads like Wetzel writing these kinds of stories and feeling the need to write at least three different times "but I'm better then those other guys in the media -- I don't take free books or go to the free parties or drink the free booze in the hospitality room......"

Someone tell this guy to take his holier-than-thou BS to church.

It is a part of covering a game and given the cynicism and outright ripping of bowls that goes on across the country every year, I'd say it has very little if any influence on anyone who covers college football.