Bowl Game Fever

It’s about half way through the bowl season, and I have to tell you that this is one of the best sports viewing times of the year. Contrary to all the naysayers who just want to see one big playoff system, I think the bowl games are very cool and very fun to watch.

The main reason is that you get to see match ups you almost never get to see during the regular season. Too many teams from so-called glamor leagues (cough, cough, SEC, cough) are too busy dodging the good teams from other conferences and are instead scheduling games with the easiest batch of cupcakes (SEC teams scheduled these schools that they knew would guarantee them a non-conference win, including Nicholls State, Sam Houston State, Furman, Lamar, Charleston Southern, Tennessee Martin, Old Dominion, Presbyterian, Eastern Kentucky, Western Carolina, Southern Alabama, Florida International – note, none of these teams were good enough to play in a bowl game this year) this side of the Hostess Bakery factory.

You get to see GOOD teams playing other GOOD teams. You get to see a USC vs. a Nebraska. You get to see an Arizona State team from the Western half of the country playing a Duke team from the Eastern half of the country. You get to see a top 20 UCLA team playing a top 20 Kansas State team. A Notre Dame vs. an LSU. An Oklahoma vs. a Clemson. These teams seem to dodge having to play against each other during the regular season, but they are PLAYING each other during the bowl season.

Everyone has won a minimum of six games (half of their schedule). Yeah, it’s kind of a drag when the “bowl eligible teams” that go 6 and 6 get invited to a bowl game. Yeah, there are TOO many of these games. Several of these bowl games should not be in existence. Too many of them end up having a team that was only mediocre, and not necessarily an elite team that truly deserved being invited to play that extra game. Seeing a couple of 6 and 6 teams playing in a bowl game was not what the bowl system started out to be.

But, a lot of these teams really open up the playbook when they get into these bowl games. They all get somewhere between two, three and even four weeks to practice, and with all of the extra time, the teams can come up with some of the most innovative offensive plays you will ever see. The games are fun. The games are exciting. USC 45 – Nebraska 42. Memphis 55 – BYU 48.

And sometimes, you get the sublime. Western Kentucky goes up 42 to 14 over Central Michigan at the half. Central Michigan storms back to make a game of it, and only trails 49 to 42, with one second left to play. Central Michigan throws up a Hail Mary pass from their own 20 yard line, and, after several laterals that would make Cal vs. Stanford of 1982 proud, they score a miracle touchdown. Instead of conservatively sending the game into overtime, they do the thing they do in bowl games.  They go for a two-point conversion to try to win the game outright.  Okay, so they don’t make it and Western Kentucky wins, but the fact is that bowl games bring out the adventurous play that is never seen in either pro or regular season college games.

There will be a whole slew of other bowl games still to be played this bowl season.  There are the games next week leading up to New Year’s Day.  There’s the New Year’s Day games.  There’s the playoff games between Florida State and Oregon and Alabama vs. Ohio State, and their championship game the following week.  It all sets up to be another great bowl season.

Bowl games are fun to watch and fun to bet on.  It is true football entertainment.

Cause in bowl games, they go for it.