For a brief moment some thought was given to holding a college football bowl game at Wrigley Field, a notion considered too daffy even for the protracted commotion of Ditzy December, college football’s comical companion to March Madness.
Still, the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl is now in its 14th edition at Yankee Stadium and the Wasabi Bowl at Fenway Park lives on, so the Wrigley idea may have been rejected without proper consideration.
College football feels around in weird places, but maybe none stranger than Fairbanks, Alaska, where for a few years there was something called The Ice Bowl, disbanded when it was realized the unsuitability was in the name.
A tip of the knit cap to Boise, Idaho, where the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl has lured teams for 27 years, even when it was neither famous nor potatoed but was shamelessly beholden to Roady’s Truck Stops.
None of this has anything to do with the subject of this column, which hopefully will find its way into sorting out the best college team in the land, a journey now beginning after a season of shadow boxing. It all gets serious now, with winners and whiners and even Indiana somewhere in the mix.
Amidst the bleak winter, that is to say, January, nearly drowned by the jangle of the NFL’s own Super Bowl swagger, college football will tie itself up into a loose knot, one team claiming to be better than all others, but happier than the winner of the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl? Maybe for a moment.
I admit I miss the old-fashioned whimsy when a Scooter’s Coffee Frisco Bowl (somewhere in Texas) could still mean something to someone.
Even the Art of Sport LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk has an appeal while the Pop Tarts Bowl and the Cheez-It Bowl grope for meaning in Orlando. All good fun.
Possibly my all-time favorite was the Cheribundi Tart Cherry Boca Raton Bowl, sponsored by a juice that promised “faster muscle recovery” and “increased stamina.” This is, I believe, the reason Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are not in the Hall of Fame.
The grandsire of whacky bowl names has to be the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl, now given way to Radiance Technologies, but the first to prove that college football will put up with anything for money.
Now the dark shadow of seriousness (that is to say, money) dims the light and hides the fun.
Ohio State and Northwestern square off during the first half of an NCAA college football game at Wrigley Field on Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024, in Chicago. Ohio State won 31-7. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
AP
Silliness should be encouraged lest the whole college football thing collapse under the weight of conference defections, transfer windows, athlete endorsements, deluded alumni, graphic greed and the most damnable thing of all — brackets.
Yes, college football is a bracket sport now, that is to say, easily wagered upon, with seeds and byes like all the other sports. Whereas it was once a guessing game presided over by honest scribes such as myself, we managed to get it right more often than not.
It was a happier time, back when order gave us New Year’s Day and sports writers’ votes to sort things out.
I’ll say this for my fraternity. We almost never got it wrong. Oh, the odd Brigham Young or Colorado might show up, but all in all, we knew our Notre Dames from our Nebraskas.
And we worked for free.
Now committees and algorithms and computers and, who knows, A.I. probably, authenticate the obvious.
While there are still 42 bowl games and enough teams to fill them, only the designated dozen matter, the number expanded from four to 12, meaning No. 13 will be just as unhappy as No. 5 used to be.
Come Jan. 20 there shall be one college football team designated as the best in the land, but not the last one to win its last game.
There will be strewn from Albuquerque to Santa Clara to Nassau to Mobile, the delighted debris of irrelevance, with 41 other winners, each one happy to have represented the school, the conference, the sport, foreign cars, auto parts, movers, hormone free chickens, taste free chicken sandwiches, department stores, gasoline, credit cards and insurance companies.
As it should be. Oh, did I not get around to picking a national title winner? Oregon.