Too many bowls, or too few good teams?

It is that time of year when the college football fan starts thinking about where their favorite team is heading for a post-season bowl game. As result, it is time to bring up that yearly debate about who is actually "deserving" of a bowl game every year. The reason that is an annual debate because every year, some team, (often a team from a non-automatic BCS bid conference), with a very good W-L record gets left out of a post-season appearance for a team that just BARELY has a .500 record.

I do not want to get into the debate on whether the NCAA should sanction a post-season playoff vs a bowl game format to determine a national championship. That argument is so old my grandfather can argue the merits of both. And he has been dead for 20 years. Although I will say this much about it. The weakest argument I have ever heard for or against a playoff, is the one that some pro-bowl system supporters use saying that the regular season is a playoff. That is such a crap argument it is not even funny. And here is why. In a playoff system, you lose one game and you are out of the tournament. In the regular season, you can win every one of your games, go completely undefeated, and NEVER even be considered for a national title. So, how can you go undefeated and not even compete for a national title, if the regular season is equal to a playoff? That makes no sense. And that brings me back to the original point of this blog entry. The issue of a bad teams playing in bowl games versus good teams sitting at home watching.

The issue for me, and the one that I despise the NCAA for allowing, is the one I alluded to above. That a barely .500 W-L team has the ability to even be considered for a post-season bowl game. The last time I checked, if you are sitting at .500, that is a "push", and you are NOT a winning team. Prior to the NCAA allowing for 12 regular season games to be played, the rule was that in any given year where a school played 12 games, they had to have 7 wins to be considered bowl eligible. That was against a normal regular season schedule of 11 games, where it was required that 6 wins be considered for bowl eligibility. It was only after the Big-10 and primarily the SEC, with support from the B-12 lobbied the NCAA to change that rule such that even with 12 games a 6 win season is considered "bowl eligible" now. That means that instead of a team having the possibility of finishing the season including their bowl win @ or above .500, if they finished 6-5 or 7-5, now they can lose their bowl game and finish with a LOSING record and still be considered as having a "successful" season. (Assuming a 6-6 team loses its bowl game, to finish 6-7.) What a crock!

The NCAA is supposed to be not only the organization that does what is in the best interest of the athlete-student, (BTW, sometime in the future I will write about my distinction between athlete-students and student-athletes, because in today's college sporting world there IS a difference), but also the NCAA is supposed to have a responsibility to protect what is in the best interest of the sport itself. In this case, the NCAA should have stuck by the original rule that a team is NOT eligible for post-season bowl participation in the 12 game regular season, UNLESS it can reach a 7 win total. Period, end of story.

But guess what would happen then. We just might have had some teams from conferences like the SEC, Big-10 or Big-12 actually NOT GET TO PLAY IN BOWL GAME!!! Oh, the horror of it!! To actually possibly see a team from the Sun Belt, WAC or MAC take a bowl spot from the BCS conferences? Not a chance! That would be fiscal blasphemy!

As I mentioned before though, this is not about protecting or promoting good football, or rewarding teams who are deserving. This is all about dollars. And the big conferences are NOT going to give up dollars easily to any other conference not in their "circle of friends", or "favorite five", (to use a cellular phone term.)

So, we as football fans are stuck watching bowl games where a team like Miss State, (and do not get me wrong, I think what Croom has done there is GREAT for football), will get paired up with a school like Boise State, Air Force or Utah, who will blow them off the field and just be a boring game to watch, AND end up finishing with a losing record.

But let's face facts. The post-season bowl format is NOT about a good football game, or even just good football. It has almost NOTHING to do with football at all. Bowl games are all about $$$$$$$$$$$$$. And big dollars at that. The money generated by post-season bowl games funds most of all of the schools other athletic endeavors in other sports, especially those driven by Title IX. The only other sport to generate as much if not more money is men's college basketball. So, let's not even go down the road about whether bowl games, and the participating teams are about football...they are NOT. And never have been.