Bowl season oversaturated, less interesting

It's time to wade through the swampy moat that is our college football postseason.

Heaven forbid, we have an actual postseason in college football that means something and carries any semblance of a national championship playoff. Instead, we've got so many bowl games that they involve half of Division I's teams. If you don't make it to a bowl game these days, you've really got a bad football team.

They've even got a bowl out of the country, in Toronto. Bowl sponsors range from pizza, fast food, hotels and muffler companies, to insurance and corn chip peddlers.

Says one longtime college football fan, Paul Pocock: "The oversaturation of bowl games is just another example of 'less being more,' or rather 'more being less."'

If you look back a dozen years ago, the real battle at the end of a college football season was the posturing of bowls to lock in the best possible opponents, a run on the top-ranked teams. Now, with the BCS and conferences locking up guaranteed spots in bowls, these games have sprung up like winter potholes across the landscape.

In 1966, there were only eight college bowl games, a year later, there were nine.

In the next 10 years, it grew to 12 bowls. By 1996, the year BYU defeated Kansas State in the Cotton Bowl, there were just 18 bowls and a 10-2 Wyoming team that played the Cougars in the WAC championship game in Las Vegas was left out entirely.

Today, a 10-2 Wyoming team would be gobbled up by one of many bowl committees.

From the 18 bowls in 1996, there are now 32 bowls. It's more of an exercise in getting a chance to practice and take players someplace to say 'thanks' and have a swell time, rather than any meaningful statement on the college football landscape.

Writes Pocock, "The days of BYU playing a Top 10 or 15 team like Iowa, Penn State, Kansas State, let alone Marshall and Tulane, are essentially over. The bowl system is broken. The BCS once again has failed to fulfill its lofty aspirations. The non-BCS bowls are chock full of one or more opponents that have no business playing and offer nothing in the way of national interest or excitement, and often neither on the local level either."

Pocock rightfully suggests some bowl reform.

Place limitations on contractually guaranteeing bowl bids. Force or allow bowls to have the flexibility to produce more meaningful matchups. Adopt an eight-, or preferably, 16-team playoff system.