This weekend kicks off the second most glorious time of the year: College Football Bowl Season.
Yes, it pales in comparison to sitting in one's living room for 17 hours, Door-Dashing lunch and dinner while binge watching college football until that point you're desperately searching for the late Pac-12 or Mountain West game that is still just entering the 3rd quarter at 1AM or desperately hoping the Hawai'i game is on TV, but it still offers great television and will be the last time for eight months, thanks to the NFL's local exclusivity policy, that you'll be able to watch multiple games at the same time without having to subscribe to DishTV (yuck) and pay upwards of $300 extra for the Game Day package.
And no, I don't buy into the communist lie that there are too many bowl games. There are teams with bowl-qualifying records who will be sitting at home this year. So, if anything, there are not enough bowls. As a matter of fact, there are 4 teams out there who wish two more bowls were being played. Oh to still have the Bluebonnet Bowl, or the California Bowl, or even the Freedom bowl. If just two of those were still standing then those four teams would be rewarded with extra practices to help them improve in future seasons.
Notice to that it's never the P5 6-6 teams that get snuffed. They always GET to conduct extra practice as a reward for mediocrity, the G5 teams are not afforded that luxury. At a bare minimum the teams that qualified but did not get selected should be allowed to conduct as many extra practices as the teams who will be playing on Dec 15th, the first day of the bowl season.
Another thing to realize is this: College football was BETTER off when it was just governed by the bowls, before the College Football Playoff or Bowl Championship Series or even the Bowl Championship Alliance were formed. All we had were the conference alignments to the bowls and the AP and UPI poll and we loved it. We also spent all year talking about how either those idiot sports reporters or the dumb SID's with votes got it all wrong. Dual Champions? Inject those days right back into my veins along with half-shirts on linebackers, Catholics vs. Convicts and BYU and Penn State shocking the world. Yes, Virginia, things were much better then.
You think an expanded College Football Playoff is going to make things better?
Wrong. It's going to make things worse. Because the P5 schools will just envision new ways to omit the G5 schools from the playoff and things will get even worse. And while there might be some good ideas out there to make an expanded playoff good, fair and honest history says that none of them will be implemented, and the powers that be will ensure that the 8-team invitation is just as exclusive as were the 2 & 4-team invitationals.
The reason for this is pretty simple. Power 5 schools all believe that the Group of 5 schools are in a different division. Inviting one of them to the dance is akin to inviting an FCS team to participate. In fact, some of them might honestly believe that North Dakota State is more worthy of inclusion than lowly little UCF.
Now, would they schedule either of them in a home & home series?
Get the hell outta here.
So, we're going to get 41 bowl games that should be treated as just that, 41 bowl games. Because it's sports, and this is a sports (and betting blog) I'm going to mention the CFP Championship game and discuss it but, like the last several years, I'm not going to stay up and watch it on a Monday night (what a stupid time for a college football game) when I have work at 6:30 Tuesday morning.
You shouldn't either.
Watch every bowl game you can, ignore the CFP Championship, that's the ONLY way to return some insanity to a sport that used to be dripping with it.
It's really our only option.
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It's no secret that my betting picks in college football were trash. It was a dumpster fire wrapped in an astroid hurtling to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Probably the worst year I've had, as my bounce back weeks started off say 2-0, and then fell apart in a sea of 1-2 or 0-3 finishes. After the rough start, I never could get any traction.
I'm going to be handling the bowl games in small bunches. Wiping the slate clean and just on those. The first batch will come soon. Then it will be pretty regular depending on when the games are played. Let's wash away the stink of the regular season and do some good here.
Don't fret about there being so many games, embrace the madness. It's what makes college football so amazing.
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