Suffering from bowl withdrawal

Published 5:32 am Wednesday, January 18, 2017

So tell me again about how there are just too dadgum many bowl games out there.

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Sure, it’s easy to spout off and get on your high horse when the whole lot of them are all announced and you’re chuckling at the mere thought of the Popeyes Bahamas Bowl.

It’s an easy, knee-jerk reaction to think “meaningless” when scouting New Mexico and Texas-San Antonio and trying to remember which mascot is which.

Now?

Now, you’d give anything to check your local listings and read rumor of one more Dollar General Bowl in the offing.

You’d watch Troy and Ohio now, wouldn’t you? C’mon, admit it. Don’t be such a football snob.

I tried to tell you that you’d miss them. Old Dominion and Toledo, too, probably even Middle Tennessee State and Hawaii.

I knew there would be a huge void once the national championship was settled.

But noooooo. The football elitists were downright snooty about it. The battle cry from near and also from afar was that the whole postseason was somehow cheapened just because there’s something called the Motel 6 Cactus Bowl out there.

They played that one, by the way. Baylor beat Boise State handily, and the nation was little worse for the wear.

So now reality has set in.

Now that you’re settled on the couch and your TV clicker can’t decide between the Australian Open some-sport-or-another (probably tennis) and yet another Raptors-Grizzlies NBA game, hey, that Boca Raton Bowl doesn’t look so bad now, does it?

Oh, for just one more helping of the Foster Farms Bowl.

There’s an emptiness in your life you can’t really describe.

Oh, the NFL is still out there, in playoff mode as a matter of fact, but only on weekends, and it took them a fortnight to get something worth watching the second half of.

College basketball, for practical purposes, starts in March.

College football not only has by far the most meaningful regular season in sports, I’m also starting to think it has easily the best, most rational postseason.

There’s layers to it, each bowl with its own spot in the food chain, and best of all it’s wall to wall viewing pleasure for four weeks.

They step aside for Christmas Day and a few dates that the NFL hijacks, but otherwise you can rest assured there’s some Quick Lane or Crampton Bowl available every night.

The four-team playoff was a wonderful idea, but it actually adds to it when you spice it all up with a lot of harmless cheap thrills during the prelims.

Even if you don’t care about either team, there’s a certain drama knowing somebody is about to get their season defined.

Plus, it all ended with a great championship game, Clemson or Alabama, to cap the whole thing off.

The Auto Nation knew it was time to concede the stage when the Clemsons and Alabamas started showing up.

But in the lead-in, they gave us something to watch almost every night.

How are you going to beat that deal?

Moralists who wonder if Mississippi State “deserved” to be in a bowl game with a 5-7 record miss the point (hey, the Bulldogs beat Miami of Ohio in the one and only St. Petersburg Bowl that was played last season, and got a dang fine trophy for it).

It’s not about a team deserving to go to a bowl. Or not.

It’s about you, the fan, and your Constitutional right — the Founding Fathers would have settled for nothing less — to watch college football every night during the holidays.

If a few corners have to be cut, so be it.

The common good benefits.

You need your football entertainment.

So upon further review, the bowls did their job. They delivered the goods.

By last count, there were 41 of them if you factor in the three College Football Playoff games.

By my quick accounting, 22 of them were one-score games, still up for grabs at the final horn. And nine of those were decided by a field goal or less — Mississippi State, for that matter, won on a blocked field goal.

Less than half of them were double-digit decisions.

And that doesn’t include — drum roll, the best named event in all of sports — the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.

It was double digits, but it was also Idaho 61, Colorado State 50, so it’s not like the thing was ever out of reach.

So take a bow, college football.

You’re being missed already.

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com