December 31, 2010

Forget fixing the BCS - how to fix the other bowls

I know people love to complain about the BCS, but the lesser bowls are far more nonsensical. As I write this, 7-5 South Florida is taking on a 6-6 Clemson team in the Meineke Car Care bowl. What a clash of gridiron titans. This will be followed up by the much higher profiled matchup of Notre Dame (7-5) and Miami (7-5), which at least has some small storyline to it, and Georgia (6-6) vs UCF (10-3).

When did these bowl games become so meaningless? I find it tough to believe that so many schools, advertisers, stadiums, etc. are making money off of all of these matchups. The BCS, I can see since people want to watch top teams square off. But each year it just seems we have more and more meaningless game stretched out over an entire month. Ohio vs Troy? Southern Miss vs Louisville? And somehow, one of the games that should be on today or tomorrow (Utah vs Boise) was played on Dec 22. What the hell? Meanwhile we have epic matchups like Nevada-BC, Pitt-Kentucky, and Middle Tennessee State vs Miami (OH) all after New Year's.

What I propose:

Require a 7-win threshold to make a bowl game: you have to have a winning record.

Get rid of automatic conference bids/tie-ins. This will help ensure that the bowls take more interesting teams.

No non-BCS bowls after the Rose Bowl.

After the BCS bowls, bowls should pick their matchups going backwards from New Year's Day (i.e. before the Rose Bowl).

Reduce the number of non-BCS bowls by a third to a half. 7-5 teams that got there on the strength of wins against Western Cupcake Tech do not deserve a bowl trip.

1 comments:

Adam said...

I get that a lot of the bowls are insignificant on a national scale, but I really don't see "too much football" as a problem. There are 35 bowl games. In college basketball, almost 100 teams advance to postseason play in the the NCAA and NIT tournaments. Especially since it's the collegiate level, I'm glad they give these kids another shot at playing because for a lot of them it will be their last time competing in any kind of significant organized athletics.

And if not for the abundance of bowl games, there wouldn't be crap to watch over the holidays.