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Re: NCAA Certifies 28 Bowls/Aloha Christmas Eve


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Why stop at 28? Let's add more bowls

By BEN COOK

April 27, 2004

You might have missed this last week and you might not even care, but the NCAA Football Certification Subcommittee re-certified all 28 bowls that were on the schedule this past season, which means they will all be back for another year.

A couple of the bowls got new names thanks to corporate sponsors. Thankfully, one of those is the Humanitarian Bowl, now called the MPC Computers Bowl.

I'm not crazy about corporate sponsor names on bowl games, but that's the way it is these days so I'm trying to adjust.

The 2003-04 bowl season was the first time that new certification criteria had been applied by the subcommittee. One of the certification criteria requires bowls to maintain an average attendance of 25,000, or 70 percent of stadium capacity over a three-year period.

The committee expressed some concern over four bowls - the Las Vegas Bowl, New Orleans Bowl, Emerald Bowl and the Silicon Valley Bowl. They were all re-certified, but not without a few eyebrows being raised.

In addition, the EV1.net Houston Bowl and the Silicon Valley Football Classic were certified, but both are required to submit letters of credit by September 1 since both failed to submit letters of credit by the deadline for the 2003-04 bowl season.

Now here is the big news: the committee also heard proposals for three new bowl games to be added to the schedule after the 2005 season.

The proposals came from Denver, Seattle and South Florida. I'd be willing to bet the Southeastern Conference is already working to try and get tie-ins with those potential bowls.

I don't know about you, but I am all aglow over the possibility of six more mediocre football teams going bowling. At least, that was my first reaction. Then the more I thought about it, I realized that maybe we are going about this bowl business all wrong.

We've heard forever that we can't have a playoff system in college football's elite division because the bowls have been too good to college football. Hooray for the bowls.

So maybe we should go a little further. Instead of complaining we have too many bowl games, let's add games. Let's not stop at three, however, let's add 30 bowl games to the current 28 so we can have 58 bowl games and every Division I-A team can go to a bowl game regardless of its record.

And yes, this does sound a little like the first round of a playoff - but it's not. And here's why. After the first 58 games, the 58 winners end their season. They won, there's no reason to play again. Let the air out of the footballs. Store the pads. Coaches break out the golf clubs. It's been a fun year and let's look forward to next season.

But the 58 losers have to play another round of bowl games, 29 bowl games this time. When those games are played, the 29 winners' seasons are over, but the 29 losers have to play again.

This time there are 14 more bowl games with one team receiving a bye into the next round of bowl games.

The 14 bowls produce 14 winners who end their season. The 14 teams that lose, which would be three consecutive losses, play another round of bowl games-seven games this time. And yes, you guessed it - seven winners finally get to quit playing. The seven losers plus the team that got a bye two rounds ago, play four more bowl games.

Those four losers play two more bowl games and finally the last two losers play the final bowl game of the season drawing the curtain down on the college bowl season, which should be sometime in late January.

This plan gives us 115 bowl games and opens up bowl possibilities for cities that would otherwise never get a bowl game. Places like Valdosta, Ga., Selma, Ala., and Cleveland, Tenn., would get to host bowls along with Miami, Dallas and New Orleans.

Companies that have never been corporate sponsors would have shots at having their own bowl game. Can you imagine the Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Bowl Game in Lake Woebegone, Minnesota?

But do you know what the absolute best thing about this massive bowl plan is? With this system 116 of 117 teams get to end their season with a victory  ;D ;D ;D, which has always been one of the strongest justifications for our current outdated bowl system that already has too many games and too many average teams winding up their seasons in bowl games.

Okay, so maybe I overreacted a little when I saw that the NCAA was thinking of adding three more bowl games. Maybe 31 bowls are not too many. After all last season bowl teams pulled in something in the neighborhood of $182 million; 5,300 athletes got to play in bowl games; 1.35 million fans attended those games; and - don't forget - 28 teams did end their seasons on winning notes.

Isn't that what it is all about?

(Contact Ben Cook of the Birmingham Post-Herald in Alabama at http://www.postherald.com.)

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