Bowl Fever...Catch It!

Ah, the day after Christmas. It brings back such happy memories, and it has such wholesome traditions. Kids get to enjoy their first full day playing with new toys. Families enjoy their last moments together before parting, gathering around yesterday’s leftovers with promises to keep in better touch next year. And everyone enjoys the Little Caesar’s Pizza Bowl (f/k/a the "Motor City Bowl"), live from Detroit. What, didn’t you watch that with your dad growing up? I thought that's where Domino's was headquartered?

For some reason, college football remains on my mind. There’s just so much wrong with it that criticizing it is like hunting at the zoo—lots of easily harpooned targets. And now that we’re easing out of the Christmas season (hope everyone ate a lot and Papa Noel was good to you), its time for the next season on the calendar—bowl season.

That’s right, the festival of hypocrisy that is College Football’s major yearly showcase. All the tradition, the pageantry, the competition that are corporate sponsored exhibition games between locked in representatives of contractually obligated conference tied-in institutions. This is so much better than a playoff. I thoroughly enjoyed the Beef O’Brady Bowl, whatever the hell a beef o’brady is. Is that like London Broil?

Bowl season brings with it lots of time-honored rituals as old as college football itself. Parades, trips, fat toupeed local businessmen wearing polyester jackets and pawning themselves off as the “Bowl Committee.” Please. These things run themselves. The only responsibilities that Bowl Committees have these days is to take free trips to “scout” potential participant teams, eat free shrimp and throw up at the corporate sponsored bar late in the third quarter. These guys spend most of the year as the sales manager at the local Subaru dealership, but thanks to connections and possession of incriminating photographs, have managed to hop on board the richest gravy train outside of International Olympic Committee membership. And while prospective host countries aren’t sending them free hookers, cash-filled envelopes and southport cookies, a Bowl Committee member’s ride is a plush one.

Other than the BCS cartel bowls, bowl games today are essentially partnerships between some desperate minor league city’s chamber of commerce and an easily duped corporate sponsor. Shreveport, you and AdvoCare V100 are a match made in Heaven. The bowl game telecast essentially is a three hour infomercial, with breaks for a college football game in between. Matchups now flow from contractual arrangements with the various conferences, so past brinksmanship and scouting resourcefulness needed to land the most attractive matchups no longer apply. The Emerald Nuts Bowl, or whatever its calling itself these days, doesn’t have to scout the country to find deserving invitees, it just automatically gets a pair of WAC and ACC also-rans.

Believe it or not, that’s a good thing, because when these bowls get the chance, they absolutely screw over college football’s best interests in favor of whatever ridiculous matchup puts the most seats in seats. Take the 2008 Rose Bowl. Those people are the worse. What accounts for their slavish insistence on an annual Big 10 (now Big 12) vs. Pac-10 (now Pac-12) matchup is beyond me. Due to BCS formulas and scenarios, they could have paired USC against Georgia. That would have put two 10-2 teams in the Rose Bowl, the number 5 BCS team (Georgia) against the number 7 BCS team (USC). Instead, they chose 9-3 Illinois, which didn’t win the Big 10, and which was ranked 13th. Instead of a great game, they got a 49-17 USC blowout. Georgia instead went to the Sugar Bowl, where they smashed Hawaii (that’s right, the Hawaii "Don't Call them Rainbow" Warriors went to a BCS bowl) 41-10. Instead of one great college football games, college football was treated to two crappy ones. But the Rose Bowl got a chance to match a historic Big 10 team against a Pac-10 team. Why anyone would want Illinois to play in their town is of course a matter for psychics, meter maids, or taxi drivers to debate.

Really, guys. The bowls lost any pretense of amateurism right about the time the “gift bag” was invented and the organic names of these bowls were cast aside in favor of the “Chick-Fil-A Bowl.” The bowl system is the college football equivalent of carbon paper. Except instead of having everything in triplicate, we are being treated to roughly 30 games no one, except the players and their parents, could care less about. The "GoDaddy.com Bowl," between Middle Tennessee and Miami of Ohio. Really, must we? Couldn't we watch an I Dream of Jeannie re-run instead? We have to watch this instead of an eight-team playoff? That makes perfect sense.

One of the great traditions of bowl season is the annual cavalcade of slap on the wrist suspensions. Can you believe a 19 year old kid on an out of town trip might miss his curfew? Or the team bus? Or have a drink? Or decide to sell all the free swag showered on them by corporate sponsors to make a couple of bucks when he looks up and sees everyone but himself profiting off his athletic talent? That the NCAA decided to suspend those Ohio State guys five games NEXT YEAR for infractions committed THIS YEAR surely has nothing to do with not risking lower ratings for the Sugar Bowl (starring, you guessed it, Ohio State)? I’m shocked, SHOCKED!!!

Happily, though, the biggest victims in this charade are not the indentured servant players but the crack addict universities who so desperately cling to this dinosaur system. In some, but not all, cases, the bowls provide a fairly decent payout to the participating schools. But nearly all conferences require the universities to share bowl payout money. So while the Maaco Bowl may pay each participating team $1 million, each school must share that money with numerous other institutions. Though each school will get its share of the other conference members’ bowl payouts, most schools feel lucky to break even. By sticking the participating universities with onerous ticket purchase obligations, the bowls are royally screwing the schools who, against all self-interest, refuse to participate in a playoff system that would provide a much greater revenue opportunity.

Take the case of the University of Connecticut. As the Big East Conference champion, it was invited to play in the Fiesta Bowl. By going, it will be paid $18 million, one of the largest bowl payouts of all. But the Fiesta Bowl requires U Conn to sell (or failing that, to purchase) at face value (lowest price $111) 17,500 tickets. It has a minimum hotel reservation requirement at three local hotels of 550 rooms. U. Conn doesn’t exactly have the same fan base as a Nebraska or an LSU, and it managed to sell only 4,000 tickets to its fans. What happens to the remainder? UConn is on the hook to pay the face value of all of these tickets. And unlike home games, bowls require that the schools buy face value tickets for all the band members and other school officials who attend. Throw in transportation expenses for the team, coaches, staff, band members, cheerleaders, etc., and U. Conn is looking at a BCS financial bath. Now, appearing in a prominent bowl may help with recruiting next year and possibly with generating alumni donations, but in these economic times, that’s a difficult expense to incur. Most university athletic departments are in the red. That is, most schools are not Ohio State, Alabama, USC, Texas or LSU. Someone like a North Carolina State or an Iowa State just doesn’t have the same cash resources as the big boys. Getting ripped off in these bowls must be more and more difficult to sustain. But God forbid we should have a playoff system, like the “Football Championship Subdivision” has every year.

But I digress. The schools get ripped off, but everyone else makes money. ESPN, the corporate sponsors, the cities whose bowls generate more tourists, the bowls themselves, and the BCS which uses these minor league bowls to justify its continued existence. I suppose you could say that Dwight, the hick linebacker from Moresville, Alabama who gets a free trip to Disney World also benefits. Coaches benefit too. With so many bowls now, about half the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision schools get to play in a bowl. Idiot athletic directors who can’t see the financial mess their programs have become usually agree to award incentive payments to coaches for taking their teams to bowl games. It’s a whole heck of a lot easier to get in the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl or the Insight Bowl or the Military Bowl Presented by Northrup Grumman than it is an eight or even 16 team playoff.

So rather than getting to watch some really excellent playoff games, we instead are treated to the festival of mediocrity. No one interrupt me at 2:30 on New Year’s Eve Day. I’ll be watching the Auto Zone Bowl, featuring 6-6 Georgia against 10-3 Central Florida. Don’t come knockin’ on my door at 11 a.m. on January 8th. I don’t want to miss a single snap of the BBVA Compass Bowl, featuring 7-5 Pittsburgh and 6-6 Kentucky (also known as the Toothless Bowl). I’m guessing it’ll be a lot easier to get restaurant reservations and see popular movies then, huh?

Bowl Fever…catch it!

Next-ok, I know you're clamoring for it...how the athletes are to blame. I know you're sick of football posts, but its football bowl season dammit! Get with the program!