Tonight TCU (10-2) and Boise State (12-0) square off in something called the Poinsettia Bowl in San Diego. This is a rarity during the bowl season, not because it’s a bowl game — Lord knows we’ve got more of those than we need — but because it’s actually going to be a good game between two excellent football teams. The big question of this one is why are they playing BEFORE Christmas and not on New Year’s Day?
The answer, of course, is that it’s not on New Year’s Day because we have a logjam of meaningless games such as tomorrow’s Sheraton Hawaii Bowl, which features 7-6 Hawaii against 6-6 Notre Dame. These are two teams that have about as much business being in a bowl as I have jumping center for the Celtics. I’m not as tall as I used to be and I’m at least a couple of pounds past my ideal playing weight so that’s not going to happen, but neither should this bowl game.
Neither should a lot of bowl games.
Now before we go any further with this discussion, allow me to state unequivocally that I do not like the bowl system and there is nothing you can do to make me like it. It is, however, what we are stuck with and I’m going to give you the reasons we have bowls and why it is that nobody hears the voice of the fans, who are tired of this system and so ready for a playoff.
1. PRESIDENTS DON’T HAVE TO FIRE COACHES: At some schools, a 7-5 season can get you fired, but at most schools it buys at least one more year because there are only so many bowls out there and every 7-5 team is assured of a bowl game. Therefore, the college president is spared the indignity of having to fire a coach. College presidents, by and large, would much rather deal with mediocrity than having to fire someone because the majority of the presidents are all about holding hands, hugging trees, wearing bowties and being politically correct. College presidents understand tenure, which properly translated means you can be a mediocre teacher and barring something like announcing you’re going to Somalia to marry 8-year-old orphan triplets and test the polygamy laws of the United States in the Supreme Court, you can’t get fired. College football coaches can get fired but they typically make more money than the president (of the school and the country) and that makes the president (of the school) very uncomfortable because it means the people who have all the money you need to retain your job would much rather see you gone than the football coach. When it comes to money boosters, they would much rather invest in a good football coach than giving the school president more money so he can hire another long haired Marxist professor of economics who thinks we would all be better off living in communal mud huts and living off a diet of barley soup and pine nuts. Also, if you have a playoff system instead of a bowl system, then the presidents would be faced with boosters that aren’t happy when their coach doesn’t get the team in the playoffs for several years in a row. It’s so much easier to justify a mediocre coach that gets the team in a mediocre bowl three straight years rather than fire a coach that didn’t make the playoffs any of those three years.
2. COACHES KNOW THE BAR IS SET VERY LOW: If you’re a coach, you can dream the dream of championships but you know that 6-6 can save your butt and 7-5 will do the trick 90 percent of the time unless you have an AD like Jeremy Foley and a school prez like Bernie Machen, who expect much better. But they’re in the minority, so if you’re smart enough to be a head coach but maybe not smart enough to beat the likes of Urban Meyer and Nick Saban, you go work for a school whose president is some bowtie wearing socialist that (a) laments that chess isn’t an NCAA sport and (b) thinks the school needs to follow the Stanford model and field a women’s humpback whale harpooning team. If you’re a pretty good but not great coach, you know that 6-6 is shaky ground but chances are you get a bowl out of it (See Charlie Cheeseburger and the Domers) and that will save your job. You also understand that seven is the magic number. If you’re 7-5, you’re pretty much home free. There aren’t that many schools out there with an athletic director and president that demand better than 7-5. And why is that? Because it’s a whole lot easier to wallow in mediocrity than it is to strive for excellence.
3. BOWLS ARE MORE CONVENIENT FOR ATHLETIC DIRECTORS: It’s a whole lot easier to satisfy the ticket and travel needs of your big money boosters once a year than it is to deal with a playoff that might involve three or four straight weeks of the logistical equivalent of dancing blindfolded through a field littered with Claymores mines. When you go to a bowl game, you have a month to make hotel arrangements and make sure all the fat cats have enough tickets even at the expense of the bulk of your fan base which might have bought tickets for 25 years but doesn’t have enough points to qualify for a pair of those 12,000 tickets that the bowls allot each team. If there was a playoff system, you might have to do this once a week for an entire month. Then there is the problem of logistics for your own team. Where will they stay? Where will they practice? What about tickets for the family of the players and coaches? It’s bad enough doing this when you have a full month to work with. Three or four consecutive weekends? Nightmare city.
4. BOWLS ARE ABOUT SELLING HOTEL ROOMS: The bowl business is about two things: (a) the local chamber of commerce selling hotel rooms and (b) high ranking members of the chamber of commerce doubling as bowl committee members getting to put on a pastel colored jacket and sitting in press boxes at important football games. The perfect example is the Weedwacker Bowl in Shreveport where if you win the game, you get to leave after one week but if you lose, you have to stay one more week. Shreveport is not the garden spot of the earth. Old Ray Earl up in Fargo, North Dakota isn’t going to surprise Faye Alice on Christmas morning with round trip airfare to Shreveport and reservations for a week at the Econo-Lodge. Since nobody in his right mind vacations in Shreveport, they have a bowl game once a year for a pair of 6-6 or 7-5 teams. Not every city is Shreveport and not every bowl will have a pair of mediocre teams playing in a meaningless game, but repeat this process another 33 times and you have the present bowl system.
5. MONEY: Now you might think this is the single most important reason the bowls exist, but in actuality, it’s only the second most important. But since we’re on the topic of money, here is the reality. Among the reasons that we do not have a playoff is that the bowls keep throwing money at the college presidents to keep the system intact and it’s so much easier to keep the status quo than it is to deal with all the nuances of something new even if something new means more money. A playoff would generate many times the amount of money that is returned by the bowls but what the bowls return is substantial enough to keep the presidents coming back for more and sweeping the idea of change under the rug. After all, if they accept the money from the bowls, then they don’t have to deal with all the other problems that would be associated with a playoff, like logistical nightmares for travel and tickets, dealing with fat cat boosters that care more about the football team than they do the state of the chemistry lab and firing coaches that didn’t get the team into the playoffs. Messy idea, these playoffs. Better keep things as they are than institute changes that might require more work and doing something distasteful like get rid of a coach that can’t do better than 6-6.
6. THE MAIN REASON WE HAVE BOWLS INSTEAD OF A PLAYOFF: If you really want to know why coaches, athletic directors and school presidents insist on bowl games the answer is very simple and please, whatever you do, don’t buy into this garbage about how much school the student athletes will miss, etc. They miss school in Division I-AA, Division II and Division III, which have expansive and lengthy playoffs (you have to win five games to win the Division III playoffs) and nobody there is complaining. A team that makes it all the way to the Final Four in basketball misses much more school than athletes would miss in a football playoff. So don’t buy into that argument because it just won’t wash. If you make it to a bowl game you get 20 extra practices. That’s an EXTRA SPRING PRACTICE. That is the reward of the bowls and why coaches are so adamant about bowls instead of playoffs. If you have playoffs, you’re working on scouting reports and implementing game plans week to week so there is no time left for working with young players that have been toiling on the scout team or buried on the two-deep all season. But, if you have 20 extra practices, you can spend a week to ten days working on the actual game and the rest of the time you can spend it working on fundamentals and coaching up the young guys that will play next year after the seniors graduate. It can shape recruiting strategies because if the young guys at a certain position aren’t showing the signs of taking the next step, maybe the head coach decides he better recruit some more players at that position. You hear that argument that we could have both bowls and playoffs but that would only work if you allow every team that is in the playoffs to have the extra practices that the bowl teams have. Those extra 20 practices are the single most important reason that we have a bowl system and coaches, athletic directors and school presidents are going to fight to keep it. Until someone comes up with a way to give the coaches their “second spring” we’ll keep on having to watch games like tomorrow night’s Hawaii Bowl.