...other than that they exist in place of a playoff (but that's for another discussion). The bad thing about bowl games is that in their existance, those higher ups in college football claim that the bowls are in place as a "end of season reward" for deserving programs. Well, what's so deserving about a 6-6 team/season? I mean, sure, you have some .500 teams like Iowa that is showing that they have a good team worthy enough to compete against a club like Texas. Or an Oklahoma St. team that until a few days ago, hadn't even won a bowl game the past 18 seasons so a bowl game this year is sort of a a stepping stone for their program, but come on! If you're a 6-6 team and get invited to a bowl and you LOSE *cough*Alabama*cough* then you finish with a losing record. So how is THAT a season that's worthy of reward???? :dis: When regular game seasons (excluding conference title games) were 11 games long, you had to win 6 to become eligible for bowl games; you had to having a winning record. 6-5 regular season and even in a bowl loss, you were .500 for the year. Well, now that the season has extended to 12 games, why didn't the number of victories to become bowl eligible increase to 7??? That's sort of a trick question because the answer is that if 7 wins were the cut off, then you would have enough teams to fill out all the bowl games. And that, my friends, is further proof that there are WAY too many bowls. Personally, I think that only the conference champs from the non-BCS bowls should be given a bid (and perhaps 2 bids for the Independants given the fact that ND would sure to claim one every year and with a team like Navy, they should have 2 spots should the Independants have 2 teams that win 7+). So if a playoff is never going to happen, I would like to see the bowl bids be the following: MWC - 1 WAC - 1 MAC - 1 SBC - 1 CUSA - 1 INDY - 2 (if the Independants don't have a 2nd team, then you take the highest non-conference champion to be determined by RPI) Now for the BCS conferences. Each conference champ gets a bowl as well as the conference runner-up. SEC - 2 Big Ten - 2 Big XII - 2 Pac-10 - 2 ACC - 2 those should be the guaranteed slots. Now, the total number of teams from the above list is 17. You can argue that 10 bowls is a nice, round number, so you take 3 "at-large" teams from the BCS conferences. Whether you choose them by the BCS formula *sigh* or RPI or simply by the 3 highest-ranked teams not to have played in their conference title game. Then you match them up according to ranking. Again, either BCS, RPI or polls. 1 vs 2 3 vs 4 5 vs 6 and so on and so forth, or as closely as possible. So, roughly (don't have all the rankings in front of me but you'll get the idea) we'd have: Fiesta Bowl: Ohio St. vs Florida Sugar Bowl: LSU vs Michigan Orange Bowl: Louisville vs Oklahoma Rose Bowl: USC vs Wisconsin (wisconsin makes the 3rd Big Ten team: champ + conf. runner up + highest ranked 3rd place BCS team) Cap One: Arkansas vs Boise St (Arkansas is in over Auburn because Arkansas is the SEC conf. game runner up with Florida and LSU being the 2nd and 3rd SEC selections) Cotton Bowl: ND vs Nebraska Holiday Bowl: Cal vs Wake Forest Alamo Bowl: Georgia Tech vs BYU Chick-fil-A Bowl: Rutgers vs Navy Gator Bowl: Troy vs Houston So, unless I made a mistake, you have every conference champ, plus the BCS conferences runner-ups and 2 Independants (which would be considered the champ and runner up) as well as the top highest ranked non-conference title game teams not exceeding 3 teams per BCS conference (LSU, Wisconsin and Rutgers). If bowls are a "reward for a good season" make it harder to get to.
