B-B-Bowls

In today’s edition I log another complaint against the bowl system.

Let’s review the BCS’s critical argument in favor of keeping the bowl system unaltered: it’s tradition. And yeah, football fans love their tradition. I get it.

But let’s remember that tradition was to get fans to visit warm places on their Christmas break. This means bowling in California, Florida, and to lesser extents, Louisiana, Texas, and Arizona.

The tradition is not chattering your tail off in Memphis, Nashville, Detroit, Boise, or Toronto, all of which forced fans and players to perform in sub-freezing temperatures. I could list another handful of bowl sites that were miserable yet above thirty-two degrees. Barely.

It is absolutely no fun to go to a game in which all you can think about is how cold you are. The cheering is minimal, there is no jumping up and down, and forget clapping. Even if you decide to move your hands, which means dropping the blanket that is protecting your face from the wind chill, you won’t make any noise with those oh-so-necessary gloves on. At this year’s Music City Bowl, I wasn’t rooting for Kentucky or Clemson; I was rooting for the clock.

Despite watching the other chilly games from the comfort of toasty hotel rooms and loved ones’ houses, I couldn’t entirely enjoy them for empathizing with the fan-sicles who had traveled who knows how long to watch their team lose.

Also, what is there to do in these places? Sure Nashville is a tourist destination for a particular contingent of our society. Birmingham, Detroit, Mobile…there are certainly interesting attractions there. But since they’re not tourist hot spots, nothing is open during bowl season! There is no reason for fans to travel for a leisurely visit lasting a few days. Especially due to the increasing regional-ization of the bowl system (which I’ll complain about in the future) it's get there, go to the game, hurry back home because there’s no reason to waste money on a hotel down here.

If you can burrow through all that complaining, I hope you see the real argument. The tradition is for bowls to be in warm, vacation destinations where fans will want to spend a few extra days enjoying their well-deserved time off. The recent spate of bowls is an abhorrent break from that and renders the BCS’s argument about preserving bowl tradition as utterly meaningless as the post-season itself.