Yes, I’m scoffing. There’s no such thing as Bowlmania. Not anymore. Gone are the halcyon days when we had a stupid, non-revolutionary system that matched conferences up, pitting the cream of the crop against one another in various locations on New Year’s Day – the absolute best way to battle a splitting hangover, by the way (Usually resulting from 24 Bud Lights at the Airliner when you couldn’t navigate past 60 frat boys from Chicago to find the bar, instead forced to buy crappy beer from the lukewarm tub. Hey! Brad Lohaus!).
Nope, now we have the non-halcyon (I’m copyrighting that word, BTW) days of a stupid, non-revolutionary system that matches the phony best teams up – but all bowl games are now drug out until spring training, played at staggered times irrespective of the one fucking tradition in college football that ever mattered, New Year’s Day.
The said new system is supposed to preserve tradition, but has ended up destroying it. This hasn’t stopped Mensa members Mike Patrick and Todd Blackledge from espousing a cockamamie 5-plus-1 scheme to award a national champion. Apparently announcing’s dynamic duo prefers the overriding criterion of first rewarding the Capital One Bowl, and devising a workable system second. See, this is the type of dipshit analysis you can’t turn away from when only four bowls are played on New Year’s Day!
Twenty years ago, we all knew we needed a playoff, and we had this stupid system with only the saving grace of New Year’s Day. Twenty years later, we all know we need a playoff, and the supposed tradition of New Year’s Day has been matter-of-factly gutted. So stop saying tradition matters, bowl proponents, because it apparently doesn’t. Irrelevant bowls like the Cotton Bowl have even convinced themselves it’s better to commandeer a worthless Friday afternoon when everyone’s at work, rather than include their pompous game on New Year’s Day. Fantastic decision (although Texas Tech presumably loves it, because no one is seeing their crappy team once again decimated).
You know what? We were hard on the Big 12, but maybe they got it right. Maybe Tech is so fucking bad that since Texas DIDN’T beat them, that’s their indictment, resulting in banishment from any conference or national title game. Sound stupid? Sure. But these are the kind of rational arguments you get when we don’t watch a playoff. Or, more to the point, don’t even watch bowl games on New Year’s Day.
Warning: Since this post ran long (shocking), we’ll continue our bitching about college football in an upcoming post focusing on Outback Bowl champion Iowa. In fact, we’ve already violated one MFG’s New Year’s resolution: Less convoluted introductions to simple blog posts. Bah!
