College bowl season is about to start, which means for the next few weeks football fans will be watching terrible match-ups in half-empty stadiums, mostly because there are no other games on.

A bowl game is supposed to be a reward for a team's good season, but today it's more likely to be an expensive junket that drains a school's treasury for little worth in return.

Village Voice Media's Pete Kotz takes a look at the state of affairs in a feature this week. He writes, "universities have chosen to hand their money away in a deal that's at best moronic, and at worst an epic swindle":

Thanks to an alliance of unblushing incompetence and corruption, college football long ago decided to outsource its most valuable asset -- its post-season earnings.

The scheme plays out each year on the ostensibly pristine fields of amateur athletics. Bowl executives grant themselves breathtaking salaries. The games, meanwhile, provide coaches, athletic directors, and the suits who nominally supervise them with an unending stream of bonuses.

Everyone else picks up the tab.

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Read "Bowling for Chumps" before you settle in on the couch for your alma mater's third-tier bowl game.