5 Things I Learned from Bowl Season
By William Boot
The bowl season is finally over. The number of teams making it to the post-season almost surpassed the number of different football costumes at Oregon. That’s a lot of teams in bowls, as you can imagine. Now that the dust has settled and Alabama has returned to its rightful place on the mountaintop, I thought I’d to address some of the wrong opinions, bad ideas, and stupid comments flying around over the past few weeks. To illustrate how goofy some of these gratuitous assertions really are, I am going to begin each statement with Goofy’s favorite exclamation just to keep them in perspective.
Garsh! That scorefest was some good football. Scoring is important, but a 67-56 game, though exciting, is not “good football.” You don’t need to have a degree from the Bill Curry School of the Bleeding Obvious to understand that scoring more points than your opponent is a key ingredient of victory. One good way to outscore your opponent is to stop them from scoring. As exciting as this hybrid of tackle basketball might be, football requires offense and defense. There is a reason why arena football hasn’t caught on.
Garsh! The rankings are unfair. According to the latest fan rankings on ESPN, Oklahoma is #1 and Auburn is #13. Keep that in mind when you are basing opinions on what the average fan thinks. The ranking system is a lot more complicated than wishing and hoping. The regular season counts, and that is what makes college football the greatest sport on Earth. If you don’t like where your team ended the season, win more, recruit better, and avoid too many cupcakes.
Garsh! No rematch. I’ve heard players and pundits state “no rematch,” but none of them had a better idea of who earned a berth into the game. I actually heard an LSU player say that a team should be conference champ in order to play in the BCSCG. Of course, they would rather blow out Oklahoma State instead, but people actually like rematches between powerhouses. Fans remember Ali vs Frazier (and the rematches) but no one remembers Ali vs Jean-Pierre Coopman. Rightfully so. In this century, three teams have made it to the BCSCG without winning their conference: Nebraska, Oklahoma and, now, Alabama. The purpose of the BCS is to pit #1 against #2 and most pundits agree that they got it right (again).
Garsh! Low attendance proves that fans are not interested in bowl games. Actually, what low attendance means is that the economy sucks and fans from less traditional programs would rather watch on television than spend $1000 on tickets to visit Shreveport and Idaho. Why were people astonished that Southern Miss and Nevada fans did not travel en masse to the Hawaii Bowl? And, speaking of media created stories…
Garsh! If Alabama wins there should be a split title. This is another case of the media making itself the story. The idea is that the AP poll should give LSU the title regardless of the outcome of the game. Let’s face it, the AP poll is irrelevant. For years, the AP was the dominant designator of champions but it withdrew from the BCS formula. The winner of the BCS game is the national champion. There are no “people’s champions” — even if you create a blog in Lee county and declare one.
Alabama is the BCS champion and Alabama got all but five votes in the pointless AP poll. Sure, there will be haters and clueless pundits – pros in the art of self congratulation – will propose options ranging from a +1 game to a 16 team playoff (a silly idea). I don’t know what the future holds (but I suspect a +1 is coming at some point), but we can always count on sports and politics to give us more bad ideas based in Twitter trends and self-promotion.