With the end of the 2008 college football season quickly approaching, teams are beginning to realize their fate in terms of bowl game contention. Several teams in the Big Ten are likely to make it into postseason action.
Wisconsin (2-5 Big Ten, 5-5 overall), believe it or not, is one of them. All the Badgers need to do is secure a win in one of their remaining two games - against either Minnesota or Cal Poly - to become bowl eligible. As of this week, UW could find itself competing in the Alamo, Insight, Motor City or Champs Sports Bowl at the end of the season, but is this something the Badgers should really feel good about?
Prior to the 2006 season, the NCAA announced it was going to relax its rules for bowl eligibility. Now, all a team needs is a 6-6 record between conference and non-conference competitors to make it into one of the 34 bowl games running from late December through early January.
At the end of last season, eight of the 11 Big Ten programs participated in bowl games. Northwestern (3-5, 6-6) and Iowa (4-4, 6-6) finished just shy of claiming a spot in one of the bowl games. As for Minnesota (0-8, 1-11), they really weren't close to earning a spot in a bowl contest.
Yes, the Big Ten is one of the nation's most respected conferences; however, there are Big-12, SEC and Pac-10 teams who also have tough roads to postseason play. And let's not forget about the Big East and the ACC.
Having so many bowl games at the end of the season takes excitement and recognition away from teams that qualify. No longer do teams have to show prosperity during the regular season. If a team puts together a mediocre season and squeezes out a .500 record, is this enough for it to pat itself on the back because it is bowl eligible? Absolutely not.
The Rose Bowl was the only bowl game available to Big Ten schools prior to 1975. To qualify, a Big Ten team would have to finish at the top of its conference. As SI.com sports writer Stewart Mandel points out in his book Bowls, Polls & Tattered Souls,"" there were only 11 bowl games in the entire nation at this time. Qualifying for a bowl game was the biggest accomplishment any college football team could hope for. Now, making it to a bowl game seems more like a chore most average Division I-A teams have to worry about, unless of course they make it to either the Rose, Orange, Sugar or Fiesta Bowl or even the Bowl Championship Game. If you are a major college team, it is actually more of an embarrassment to not be bowl eligible than it is an accomplishment to earn a bid.
Returning back to the way things used to be would make bowl games more prestigious and actually worth watching. Only the nation's best teams would qualify for these games. As a viewer, smaller bowl games seem more like an easy way for brands and companies to reach a national audience. I feel more like I'm being sold something by tuning into these games than I feel like I am watching a postseason football game.
It amazes me how a team like Wisconsin will spend its whole regular season getting rocked by conference rivals, and then at the end of an upsetting year, it could qualify for a bowl game against a team it might consider pairing with for an exhibition contest.
Creating some sort of a playoff bracket could be one way to return college football's postseason play back to something worth raving about. The NFL playoffs seem to work just fine; however, ESPN columnist Bill Simmons argues that if a professional team wins its division with an 8-8 record, it should not be given a playoff spot. He believes that spot should go to a different team that is more deserving of this honor. Here again, even at the professional level, a .500 winning percentage should not be enough for a team to earn a pass into postseason action.
Is participating in a game like the Papajohns.com Bowl or the Meineke Car Care Bowl almost a month after the regular season ends really something that college football teams should strive for?
If you also would like to watch bowl games that mean something over winter break, e-mail Crystal at crowns@wisc.edu.
