Today's 27-21 victory by Syracuse over Minnesota in the Texas Bowl was arguably the most boring bowl game we've seen so far this year. Neither offense was any good, the coaching was atrocious, and the defenses were nothing spectacular despite having some good numbers. What marked this game was bad play, bad football and bad TV played out in front of a 1/3 full Reliant Stadium on dodgy turf in a spectacle that didn't do much to promote Houston, or Texas for that matter.
The argument FOR these games is simple, they're to reward the players for a successful season. Just remember, successful in the upside-down world of College Football is .500. Because of this there are 35 post-season games, all but one being meaningless. It's time to cut that number in half, raise the minimum standard of "bowl-eligible" to 8 wins and bring all of the games within 48 hours of New Year's Day again.
Back when bowl season was bowl season, you had 9-10 games on New Year's Day. The holiday would consist of waking up early in advance of your hangover, watching the Tournament of Roses parade and then spending the remainder of the day with multiple TV's or picture in picture trying to get in as much College Football as humanly possible. This was fun, it improved the remote control skills of many a growing boy and helped beer sales across the country.
Today, we're saddled with "Capital One Bowl Week" which, like Houston Restaurant Week, is really Bowl Week(s) and removes from us the ability to watch another, good, game while the dog is on another channel. So now we're saddled with 35 bowl games only 5 or 6 of which are going to be very good. We're stuck with teams of middling quality who only are in the game because the slot needed to be filled. Even worse, the population of bowl representatives with bad polyester coats is getting out of control. In many cases these are public-private partnerships which means that some of your tax dollars might have gone to buy Fred Hilden, President of the local Chamber of Commerce, a bad jacket that he's only going to end up spilling cocktail sauce on at the after party.
I would say that it's imperative this stops and we get back to bowl sanity but this is never going to happen because of one thing: Money. For the most part these bowls make tons of it and, for lack of anything better to do, people watch. Until we all ban together and tell the bowl committees that we're not going to put up with it any longer these things are never going to change.
I nominate the Texas Bowl to throw themselves on the sword first. Let's end this mess of a bowl and go back to just watching instead of rolling out the red carpet for a couple of major conference teams with sub-five hundred in-conference records. If nothing else, it'd be MORE world class to NOT have the game than it is to play it. And we all know how much Houston loves anything perceived to be world class right?
