Is It Time to Kill the Bowl Games?

Here is a funny stat I heard today.  The Texas 5A state football championship had better attendance than 18 of the 35 bowl games.

Here are some other facts.  Utah St. sold 3000 tickets to their bowl game and they never go to bowl games.  Boise sold 3000 tickets to go to Vegas.  Hell the Sugar and Orange Bowls were empty.

Isn’t it pretty clear, people don’t care about bowl games anymore.  Fans aren’t even going to see their teams in major bowls games.  They exist for TV filler for ESPN and so some coaches can pretend that they’ve made some progress.  (OK and here is where someone chimes in and tells me they love bowl games.  Good For You).

We aren’t going to the games, we aren’t watching them unless we have nothing better to do and as it turns out they just don’t matter anymore at all.

The thing was, there was a time when I cared.  When all the bowl games got played on one day and we got to argue about who was champion.  Now we’ve rendered good games meaningless because we label one game the BCS championship.  When the playoff comes, the bowl game begin to mean even less.

And one more not about the old system, say Bama had played Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl and Stanford had played Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl plus Oregon playing K-State in the Fiesta.  Wouldn’t today be a lot more fun if we could argue over whether we thought Oregon or Bama or Stanford was national champion instead of just being disappointed that we’ve handed the cousin lovers another crown.  I know I’d like it more.

So lets kill the bowls, go to at least a 6-8 team playoff and at least we can sort of be happy about our champion.