Running 2011 Bowl Season Thread- Match-ups on Page 1

I take no offense.

 

Well. I was wrong.

The Southland Conference will continue a proud tradition of runner-up finishes.

 

NEW ORLEANS -- Bowl attendance was down 2.1 percent this season through the first 31 games of the 35-game postseason.

http://espn.go.com/college-football/bowls11/story/_/id/7436045/matchups-economy-bring-bowl-attendance

Two words for that: Bull. Shit. Way more than 2.1 percent in the asses-in-seats category (as opposed to the "how badly can we extort the schools to lose money 'buying' tickets" category). Some of the camera angles have been creative to say the least.

 

I'm sure this has come up a *ton* through the years, but what's an ideal number for bowl games? What about, oh half? Seemed to work when I was a kid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_NCAA_Division_I-A_football_season#Bowl_Games

Eighteen bowls. Ten had two ranked teams. Only three had two unranked teams. Granted, there are more teams now (120 vs. 107), and more bowl-eligible teams with the 12-game schedule vs. 11. But couldn't 18-24 work (the WWL notwithstanding)?

 

I'd start at 30, since there are 120 programs it'd be nice to say you have to be the top half of the sport to play in a bowl game. But 25 is probably more of an ideal number.

 

An easy way to lower the number of bowls would be to have an independent panel of travel experts rate the potential host cities as holiday season tourist destinations. That'd get rid of a bunch of 'em. Also, no more than one bowl per city.

 

25's good but definitely no more than 30
That'd be plenty.

 

If you're going to make a serious move at legitimizing all the bowls, you should bring it down to more like 20.

You had 8-10 bowls this time around with 6-6 meeting 7-5 or some such travesty.

 

I can't remember if I read this as a news article or just heard it offhand, but i recall something about the dirty little secret being that the NCAA can't regulate the number of bowls. They can take away certification after a couple of years if the bowl doesnt meet some criteria, but they would be facing lawsuits if they prevented a city from putting one together.

 

I'm no travel expert, but the bottom of barrel for bowl cities? Boise.

Yes, I'd rate it lower than Detroit.

 

Birmingham, anyone?

 

This is true. And that's the same reason the NCAA eliminated the Kickoff & Pigskin Classics. They couldn't stop other cities from creating them so they did away with them.

However, certifying a bowl game doesn't guarantee that bowl will have teams to play in it. If enough teams don't meet the six win minimum for bowl eligibility the NCAA is under no obligation to waive the six-win minimum/ .500 minimum to fill open spots.

To my knowledge, the only two times they've done that have involved conference champions finishing with below .500 records - in both cases there were more than enough eligible teams to go around. I can't see them waiving the rule just to assure the SportsJournalists.com Bowl in Tahoe has two teams.

There are 70 bowl spots available right now and this year there were only 70 bowl eligible teams (plus UCLA). Western Kentucky was the only eligible team that didn't play in a bowl game.