Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Just what we needed

If there's anything the average college football fan has been asking for the last few years, it's more bowl games. Right? RIGHT?
The NCAA has approved 35 bowl games for the next four years, including two new ones: the Dallas Football Classic and the New Era Pinstripe Bowl in New York.
Perfect. I'm actually a little intrigued by the Pinstripe Bowl, just because it'll be played at Yankee Stadium and I'm a sucker for games at cool venues. But there are already some really crappy bowls (I'm looking at you, Little Caesar's Bowl and New Mexico Bowl). When is enough enough? Did you realize that just 13 years ago (the 1996-97 season), there were only 18 bowl games?

It's not that I have anything against a Rutgers-Iowa State game; the problem is that the "postseason" has lost any semblance of value. With Western Kentucky now a full-time FBS member, there are 120 major college teams, and 70 of them will play in bowl games. That's 58.3%. Isn't a bowl berth supposed to be, I dunno, a reward of some sort? It's pretty sad that it's now easier to make a bowl game than to not make a bowl game.

On a related note, exactly 71 teams have been bowl-eligible in each of the past three seasons. But what if, just out of bad luck, there are only 69 next year?
“They don’t have a formula yet, but the NCAA has told all the bowls that if there aren’t enough bowl-eligible teams, all the bowls will still be played,” said Bruce Binkowski, executive director of San Diego’s Pacific Life Holiday Bowl and the San Diego Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. “They still need to figure out what the formula is going to be.”

It’s not clear if that could mean teams with losing records playing in a bowl or granting berths to 6-6 teams whose records include two wins against teams from the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). Currently, only one FCS win is allowed to count toward bowl eligibility.
Wooooo. So even if Michigan doesn't improve much from last season, a 5-7 record might be enough to squeeze into the GMAC Bowl. I'm pumped.

The only positive is that I think I have a legitimate shot of getting the Forever Saturday Bowl approved for the 2014 season.

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