The Hlog

The Bowl System is America's Finest Creation

Wild, wild horses couldn't make me watch a Florida Atlantic-Memphis or Nevada-New Mexico football game in September, October or November. But slap those matchups in a bowl game, and let's watch some football!

Utah-Navy is an unwatchable game in Week 4 or Week 9 of the regular season. But when the two squads met in the Poinsettia Bowl Thursday night, it was appointment television. Could Utah win its seventh-straight bowl? I had to know.

OK, being in a few bowl pools online and at work increases the interest. Football without gambling is, after all, soccer.

But how could you not watch Friday night's New Orleans Bowl between Florida Atlantic and Memphis, if only because FAU Coach Howard Schnellenberger wore a fabulous suit. Football coaches should wear suits. Plus, I kept waiting and waiting for that one panoramic shot of the Superdome to show vast swaths of empty seats instead of the tight shots of the pockets of fans for the two teams. If it happened, I missed it.

Three bowls were to be played Saturday. Southern Mississippi played its last game for fired coach Jeff Bower. It lost. Sentiment gets squashed every so often.

Then came Nevada playing New Mexico in the New Mexico Bowl. Which seemed totally unfair. You get a bowl game on your home field? The winner of last year's inaugural New Mexico Bowl was, by the way, New Mexico.

Let's see if we have this right. There's a New Mexico Bowl. Has someone informed Steve Alford of this? It leads one to believe New Mexico is (gasp) a football state. By the way, don't expect Alford to eventually fail at New Mexico. He should know how to recruit by now, and recruit enough to win 20-plus games every year there. Then he gets the Indiana job after Kelvin Sampson is found guilty of bribing officials, buying players, and worst of all, calling Bob Knight overrated.

Saturday's bowl finale was a matchup of Brigham Young and UCLA in the Las Vegas Bowl. It marked BYU's third-straight year in the Las Vegas Bowl. Most BYU supporters, I'm told, are Mormons. I don't know how much fun Mormons are allowed to have in Las Vegas, and I'm not making a wisecrack about a religion. But I'm guessing the sin merchants of Vegas didn't do cartwheels down the Strip when they heard BYU was coming back to town yet again. That's assuming anyone connected to the casino/malls of the Strip had even heard of the Las Vegas Bowl.

UCLA's coach, Karl Dorrell, got fired recently, too. You know there are too many bowls when teams not good enough to save their coaches' jobs can get into them.

This is my first year of not making a bowl trip since 1999. I've done Phoenix, San Antonio (twice), Miami, Tampa (twice) and Orlando in that time. This year I sit at home waiting for another ice storm, watching Nevada play New Mexico. I'll be all right.
  |    Login or Join to Post Comments