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Apparently the Big 12 is so bad when it comes to football that the league’s commissioner is begging the NCAA to declare that any team that wins six games is automatically invited to a bowl game.
As if most of the bowl games weren’t bad enough to begin with, just think of how bad they will be when ESPN the Ocho is televising a bowl game featuring the Aggies and the Big 10 equivalent of the Aggies.
The Texas Bowl is already on the verge of becoming unmatchable with it’s new push to dump entertaining football teams like the Houston Cougars so that it can get awful Big 12 and Big 10 teams to play there instead.
And now the Big 12 is trying to make it mandatory.
Whatever happened to the days when a bowl game was a reward for a good
season? Back when going to a bowl game really meant something?
If a
team can’t finish with a better than 6-6 season playing the type of
schedule the Aggies play, then that team should be looking for a new
coach, not getting the reward of a bowl game. It’s already hard enough
for schools in the minor conferences to get into a bowl game, but now
the Big 12 is trying to make that near impossible.
Let’s look at the Texas Bowl. Starting next bowl season, the Texas Bowl
will host the number-five team from the Big 12 and the number-six team
from the Big 10.
That would probably result in a game featuring the
Aggies and Michigan State. And outside of College Station and Michigan,
who really wants to watch these two teams play football?
You can’t get
much more boring than watching a mediocre Big 10 team play football.
The biggest crowd the Texas Bowl has ever had was for the TCU/Houston
game two years ago. And the Rice/Western Michigan last year drew more
people than the inaugural Texas Bowl which featured Rutgers against
Kansas State. Yet the Texas Bowl somehow feels that featuring mediocre
football teams is better for its survival. Which means that the game
will only get so bad that we’ll begging for it to die so as to put us
fans of quality college football out of our misery.
But this is what the Big 12 is trying to force on the football
community. Bowl game after bowl game of mediocre football teams facing
mediocre football teams because the NCAA approved of the proposal to
guarantee bowl slots to teams lucky enough to go 6-6 on the season.
It’s already hard enough for teams like the Cougars to get invited to a
decent bowl game, but this would make it virtually impossible, which I
supposed the Big 12 would be happy with since that would mean the
disappearance of some very good football so that mediocre programs like
the Aggies and Baylor can find it easier to survive.
I can’t blame the Big 12 too much, I guess. After all, there’s only so
many FCS teams that can be scheduled during non-conference play, and
most of them play Texas. So the only way to guarantee that some team
like the Aggies makes a bowl is to let them get into a bowl game by
being mediocre instead of forcing the Aggies to actually become a good
program.
But let me end with an obligatory request. It’s really time for the
NCAA to dump the bowl system and go to a playoff. It’s time that we go
back to rewarding college football teams for having good seasons.
Though knowing the NCAA, it would still find someway to keep a team
like Houston or Boise State or TCU or Utah out of the playoffs in favor
of some 6-6 team from the Big 12.
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2009.
