NCAA Approves Four New Bowl Games, Increasing the Lineup to 32 Games

Showing that it can always find a way to ruin a good thing, the NCAA approved four new bowl games in the offseason, increasing the bowl lineup to 32 games over a three-week stretch from December 19-January 8.

Now I love college football as much as anybody, but this is too much. I also love ice cream but it doesn’t mean that I eat a gallon of it every night. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. In the case of the bowl games, less would definitely be more.

There are 119 teams in Division I-A, which means more than half of them will play in a bowl game this season. Getting selected to play in a bowl used to be about rewarding a school for an outstanding season, but now it rewards mediocrity. With 64 slots to fill, merely finishing with a winning record virtually guarantees a team a bowl invitation somewhere.

Bowl games added this year include the New Mexico Bowl, the International Bowl (to be played in Toronto) and the Birmingham Bowl, in addition to a fifth game in the Bowl Championship Series. Now, I can live with another game in the BCS because it will provide more of an opportunity for a worthy team from a non-BCS conference (of course, it doesn’t move us any closer to a playoff to decide college football’s national champion).

The power conferences – Southeastern, Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Pac-10, Big 10 and Big East, along with Independent Notre Dame – rule college football and the NCAA as a whole. The NCAA added a fifth BCS game in part to alleviate criticism that the BCS is a monopolistic system designed to ignore the lesser conferences. Again, I have no problem with that. Actually, I’d prefer to see an undefeated team from a non-BCS conference (Western Athletic, Mountain West and Conference USA) rather than a sixth- or seventh-place team from one of the major conferences.

But some of the these bowl games have to go, and take the sponsors with them. Do we really need the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsetta Bowl (December 19)? Or the Pioneer Pure Vision Las Vegas Bowl (December 21). Would the Earth spin off its axis if the Emerald Bowl (set for December 27 in San Francisco) ceased to exist?

I can’t imagine college football fans being too devastated if the NCAA slashed the bowl lineup by a third or even by a half. Well, the bettors would probably go ballistic.

So many bowl games water down the excitement level. You’ll get maybe a dozen games with intriguing matchups that will capture the interest of fans. Certainly, the BCS games and a few others, depending on the particular story lines. That leaves too many boring games with mediocre, uninteresting teams. It’s reflected in the attendance. A lot of the bowl games, especially the lesser-known ones, don’t draw that well. But the NCAA never will tell us that.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, there might have been 11, 12 bowl games – I can’t remember the exact number. The Big Four naturally – Rose, Orange, Cotton and Sugar Bowls, then the Fiesta Bowl came into existence in the early 1970s and grew in prominence. I remember watching the Astro-Blue Bonnet from the Houston Astrodome on New Year’s Eve. Then there was the Sun Bowl, Gator Bowl, Peach Bowl,Tangerine Bowl and Holiday Bowl, and that was about it. Now there are so many games it’s like a blur.

The BCS was created to determine a definitive national champion and it got lucky last season when Southern California and Texas – clearly the two best teams in the country – were pitted against each other in the Rose Bowl.

The down side of the BCS, however, is that it slapped college football tradition in the face. January 1 used to be the culmination of the bowl season but that isn’t the case any more with the BCS games stretching into the first week of the new year. Five bowl games will be played after New Year’s Day.

Now there is still something pleasing about watching a full day of college football on January 1 while nursing a hangover from the night before, but it isn’t quite the same anymore. And besides that, the first game of the day starts too early at 11 a.m. There ought to be a law that no football game on New Year’s Day can begin before noon.