The BCS has killed the bowl games

Michael Wilbon:

I'd never taken a long walk on New Year's Day, never been bargain hunting on New Year's Day, never been to a beach on New Year's Day.

I've never been to church, never been to a restaurant, never been to a friend's house. Never, not once in 39 years of single life, did I ever have a date on New Year's Day. Never, not once in 11 years of married life, have I ever taken my wife to dinner on New Year's Day.

One thing and only one thing has mattered for every single New Year's Day of my entire life: bowl games. Didn't matter who was playing; I watched bowl games. Almost everybody I knew has watched bowl games. Started at noon, maybe 11 a.m., ended at midnight or thereabout. Either I watched on TV or covered them for this newspaper for a total of, oh, 42, 43 years, something like that.

Until Thursday.

Sometime around 2 p.m. on New Year's Day 2009, after watching the first two periods of the NHL's Winter Classic outdoors at Chicago's Wrigley Field, I announced that I was leaving the house to take a drive. My wife, astounded, said: "You've never left the house on New Year's Day in the whole time I've known you. Is there something wrong with you?"

Well, yeah, something was seriously wrong. The bowl games, for the first time in my life, didn't matter. The people who run college football had succeeded, finally, in killing New Year's Day. Instead of college playoff games commanding our attention, we were left with a bunch of BCS exhibitions that meant absolutely nothing. I didn't know what games were being played at what times, nor in several cases, what day. Not until I sat down and started typing these words did I know that the Fiesta Bowl, played right here in Arizona where I'm spending the first week of this new year, will be played Monday. I'm now guessing -- seriously, this is a total guess -- the Sugar Bowl was to be played last night. The Cotton Bowl, I'm told, has been moved out of the early New Year's Day slot to the day after.

Why? The Cotton Bowl hasn't been a game of consequence for years.

...

There is more. If I had not found this Wilbon piece, I was thinking about writing the same thing in a post. I will watch the Fiesta Bowl simply because I care about the Texas Longhorns and not because the outcome of the game is of any importance. The BCS standings robbed the Longhorns of a chance to play in a meaningful game and gave the spot to an Oklahoma team defeated by the Longhorns on a neutral field.

I am pretty sure I will not watch the OU-Florida game which pretends to be a national championship game, but is not. Until the NCAA gets a realistic playoff series that is played in the bowl games leading to a real national champ, I will probably just watch whatever game the Longhorns are in.

I did follow the Cotton Bowl in the background on the web, checking the store from time to time. I may do that with the OU-Florida game, but I am with Wilbon on the death of the bowl games.