When you blindfolded me – handcuffs in one hand, a Weed Eater in the other – I didn’t ask questions. Not a peep.
When you whispered sweet nothings in my ear, breath as hot as a Shreveport summer, about Famous Idaho Potatoes and late December in Detroit, I bit. When you introduced names such as Belk and Zaxby’s and BBVA Compass and TicketCity, I welcomed them, sight unseen, into my autumn embrace. When you swept me to the Bahamas and gave me Central Michigan and to the Heart of Dallas and gave me UNLV, I never complained, wavered, never asked why.
But this? This is different. When you mumble and moan and go on and on about how badly you want a 5-7 Nebraska team, I’m sorry, bowl games. The blindfold comes off.
Collegiate bowls are, at their best, inherently and hopelessly archaic, a link to the good ole days and good ole boys, one of the last umbilical cords to pomp, pageantry and subjectivity, to an era when newspaper reporters (and US presidents) determined national champions, when regional biases and cigar-soaked, back-room politicking were considered part of the routine and the charm. It is the most anachronistic of the NCAA’s boatload of anachronisms, the sporting equivalent of the electoral college, one hot mess of silly, albeit a fun, well-meaning sort of silly.
But even silly has its tipping point, and we’re creeping dangerously close to the precipice. In 1995, there were 18 such postseason one-offs. In 2005, there were 28. Now there are 40 – 40 games, 40 winners, 40 trophies, and 80 slots to fill.
The Football Bowl Subdivision has 127 fully vested members, which means 62.9% of all FBS programs will reach the postseason. If that seems like a hell of a lot, it is: take that ratio and apply it to America’s big four pro sports leagues, for example, and the NFL would have to open its playoffs up to 20 teams instead of the current 12; the NBA and NHL, 19 clubs instead of 16; MLB, 19 franchises instead of 10.
How did we get here? Blame deregulation. Blame ESPN, the broadcasting giant who grew to love bowls so much it now runs 13 of them. Blame the Power 5 conferences for hoarding television money and power. Blame the other conferences for responding to the aforementioned Power 5 by scrambling to cram their teams into a new glut of backfill bowls. We got here because no league commissioner wants their respective programs to be left out of the party at 6-6, or, Heaven forbid, 7-5, even if that means playing in a strip mall parking lot just west of Pensacola.
And now even bowl apologists — he said, typing with one hand, the other raised in guilt — are on the verge of going all Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, pounding the sand in frustration, wondering if the maniacs finally, really did it. As of Sunday, 71 FBS programs were “bowl eligible,” having garnered at least six wins from a 12-game schedule. Going into the weekend, there are 14 teams that remain one victory away.
Which leaves nine slots left, and hand-wringing. Lots and lots of hand-wringing. In the last two decades, only one team, the 2001 North Texas Mean Green, has appeared in a bowl game with only five victories on its ledger, and it did so thanks to a Sun Belt Conference regular-season championship – all five of its wins were against league opposition – and an NCAA waiver. In 2015-16, there remains the possibility of multiple Mean Greens crashing the party, for no other reason than the supply of 6-6 options becoming exhausted.
A conference call is reportedly scheduled this week among members of a special NCAA oversight committee to determine, and we’re not joking, how to definitively determine the relative postseason merits of programs with 5-7 records or worse, the cream of the world’s largest pillow fight.
Of course, the suits largely did this to themselves. In the summer of 2012, the NCAA’s Board of Directors came up with a multi-tiered tiebreaker system to determine how bowl games could be filled on an emergency basis:
1) A 6-6 team with a win over a Football Championship Subdivision program;
2) A 6-6 team with two FCS victories;
3) A 6-7 team that loses its conference championship game;
4) A 6-7 team that played a 13-game schedule, such as Hawaii, or teams that agree to play at Hawaii.
5) FCS teams in the final year of the two-year FBS “transitional” status, so long as they don’t have a losing record.
6) A 5-7 team with a top five Academic Progress Rate (APR) score, with 5-7 teams ranked for selection thereafter by their relative APR;
7) A 5-7 team with a win over any program that was once a member of the Big 12;
8) A 5-7 team with a win over any program that was once a member of the Big East;
9) A 5-7 team that can present a waiver co-signed by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
OK, OK, you got us — the last three are phony. But the first six aren’t. And, big shock, the bowls, leagues and the NCAA allegedly aren’t on the same page as how to administer No6 on the list. Thus, the conference call.
The more sensible solution, of course, would be to cap the number of games, period, and to cap it say, 50% of the current FBS membership at any given time, a rolling number, rounded up, that accounts for a growing pool. For 2015, that’s 64 slots, or 32 contests. If your favorite 6-6 bunch happens to miss the cut, well, tough petunias.
Otherwise, where does the madness end? The new-for-2015 Cure Bowl was formed to raise money and awareness toward the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, all of which is noble and honorable. It’s also the third bowl game to be held at the Citrus Bowl over a span of a month, which is complete overkill. More insanity: at least eight other contests have reached the drawing-board stage over the past five years, according to various media reports, from locales as familiar as Little Rock, to Toronto (which hosted the International Bowl from 2007-2010), Ireland and Dubai. Cornhusker fans will go to the ends of the Earth for their beloved Big Red, but would they travel en masse to the Persian Gulf to watch 5-7 Nebraska take on 5-7 Missouri?
When you’re parsing the merits of also-rans, it’s not silly anymore; it’s asinine. Forty winners is too damn many. The haters know it. Deep down, the lovers know it, too. It’s not us, bowl games. It’s you.
