Goin’ Bowlin'

College football is spectacle like no other; the bands, the fans, the yell groups, and, most of all, the pure excitement that a college football game can cause an entire city and sometimes an entire region of the country. Nothing in the United States causes the kind of fervor as a big college football game. Some people like it because this is a time where the sport is at its highest level and still pure, and somewhat untainted, before the players reach the National Football League and start speaking in the third person.

When there is a football game on any campus across the nation the streets are flooded with students proudly showing off their school colors. The students are very dedicated and usually very rowdy. Students will be up early in the morning, which is about 10 for them, and will head out to the stadium and start cheering, and probably drinking, to reach the maximum level of noise to help their team out.

The greatest of all the college football games comes at the end of the year. For three weeks that span from mid-December to the first week of January, is the College Bowl season. Teams are chosen to play in these special games that will match them up against a team from another conference who performed well enough during the regular season to make it to postseason play. It used to be that, depending on the rankings, a team would win the National Championship solely by getting the most votes in one of the two polls.

It was in the 1998 season that all of that changed and the Bowl Championship Series made its way into college football and the conversations of college football enthusiasts alike. The BCS consists of four bowls, the Rose, Sugar, Fiesta and Orange, and in one of these four bowls will feature the number one and number two teams facing against each other for only one National Champion.

It was a good idea in theory, but like most good ideas it is full of flaws. The BCS had dodged a number of bullets of three or four teams that were so incredibly close to each other in the BCS computer rankings that they would’ve had a full blown epidemic on their hands, but two or more of the teams lost in the last couple of weeks of the season and helped them out. It wasn’t until 2008 that we had our first full blown controversy. The USC Trojans were ranked number one in both the Associated Press and USA Today/ESPN/Coaches poll, but were ranked number three in the BCS rankings behind the Oklahoma Sooners and the LSU Tigers. The worst part about it was that Nebraska was destroyed in their final game of the regular season, the Big XXII Championship game by a score of 38-9. USC played in the Rose Bowl and easily disposed of the Michigan Wolverines while LSU beat Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl. USC finished first in AP poll and LSU finished first in the Coaches Poll and we had a split National Championship for the first time since 1997 when Michigan and Nebraska were named Co-National Champions.

There are two new Bowl Games in the mix beginning in the 2010/11 BCS schedule.  The New York Yankees will host the New Era Pinstripe Bowl which matches the Big East team with the third best record against the Big XII team with the sixth best conference record.  The other inaugural bowl game is the Dallas Football Classic which will be held at Cotton Bowl stadium, replacing the Cotton Bowl which has moved to the new Cowboys Stadium.  Other changes to the bowl series include a name change for the Emerald Bowl to the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl and the Motor City Bowl has changed its name to the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl.

Major changes could happen anytime with a few teams from the Big XII looking to jump ship to bigger payouts and conferences so stay tuned and make plans to see your favorite bowl game or take in a new one!