SATURDAY’S BOWLS
New Orleans Bowl: Louisiana-Lafayette (8-4) vs. Nevada (7-5), 11 a.m., ESPN
New Mexico Bowl (Albuquerque): Utah State (9-4) vs. UTEP (7-5), 2:20 p.m., ESPN
Las Vegas Bowl: Colorado State (10-2) vs. No. 22 Utah (8-4), 3:30 p.m., ABC
Famous Idaho Potato Bowl (Boise): Air Force (9-3) vs. Western Michigan (8-4), 5:45 p.m., ESPN
Camellia Bowl (Montgomery, Ala.): Bowling Green (7-6) vs. South Alabama (6-6), 9:15 p.m., ESPN
College football’s bowl season — reordered, restructured and once again enlarged — is about to kick off.
The first five of 38 bowl games will be played Saturday, starting at 11 a.m. with Louisiana-Lafayette vs. Nevada in the New Orleans Bowl — a low-key launch for the biggest bowl blitz yet.
Seventy-six of the 128 FBS teams, or almost 60 percent, will play in a bowl, including a dozen teams with 6-6 records and one with a losing record. Bowls will be played from Honolulu to New York and from Detroit to Nassau, Bahamas.
Four newcomers join the proliferation of bowls this season: the Bahamas Bowl, the Boca Raton (Fla.) Bowl, the Camellia Bowl in Montgomery, Ala., and the Miami Beach Bowl in the Marlins’ baseball stadium.
The number of bowls has doubled since 1990, when there were 19. Thirteen bowls have started since 2000. Each growth spurt has been accompanied by renewed complaints that there are too many bowls filled with too many undeserving teams.
On the other hand, even the most obscure bowls are harmless enough, easily ignored by fans who find them excessive. Average bowl attendance declined each of the past four years, but the games continued to draw viewers for ESPN, which in turn allows ever-increasing payouts to teams.
“I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad bowl game,” said TCU coach Gary Patterson, whose team will face Ole Miss on Dec. 31 in Atlanta’s Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, one of the six top-tier bowls in the restructured postseason lineup. “Hopefully the bowl system never goes away.”
Louisville coach Bobby Petrino, whose Cardinals will play Georgia in the lower-tier Belk Bowl in Charlotte, N.C., on Dec. 30, acknowledged, “There’s a lot of bowls. There certainly is.” But that’s fine, in his view. “This is a reward for what (players) have done throughout the season — to be able to go to a bowl site, have a great experience and enjoy it, remember it for the rest of their life.”
Patterson is concerned the new four-team College Football Playoff, which will hold this season’s semifinals in the Rose and Sugar bowls on New Year’s Day, carries such high stakes that the fun will disappear from bowl trips for the participating teams.
“One of the things I worry about with the playoff system, particularly that last game, is (the players) don’t get an experience,” Patterson said. “I’ve always felt bowl games were a great gift to your kids because they get a chance to see how other people live and meet new people.”
In addition to the New Orleans Bowl, Saturday’s schedule includes Utah State vs. Texas-El Paso in the New Mexico Bowl, Utah vs. Colorado State in the Las Vegas Bowl, Air Force vs. Western Michigan in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, and South Alabama vs. Bowling Green in the Camellia Bowl. The Las Vegas Bowl will be on ABC, the others on ESPN.
From Saturday through Jan. 4, one to five bowls will be played each day except for Sundays and Christmas Day.
Bowls seem to be near the saturation point, if only because they generally require teams with at least .500 records. (Fresno State is in the Hawaii Bowl despite a 6-7 record because of a waiver for teams that fall below .500 by losing conference championship games.)
The bowl structure changed in several ways this season, the most prominent being that two bowls became playoff semifinals. The unprecedented 38-bowl lineup doesn’t include the Jan. 12 national championship game, which is outside the bowl system.
Also among the changes, the playoff committee set matchups for four other major bowls (Orange, Peach, Cotton and Fiesta) and conferences took more control of matchups for lesser bowls.
The SEC scrapped its former pecking order and lumped six games — Tampa’s Outback, Jacksonville’s TaxSlayer, Nashville’s Music City, Memphis’ Liberty, Houston’s Texas and the Belk — into a “pool of six,” assigning teams to each. While the Outback traditionally outranked the Belk, SEC officials, if not most fans, now consider them equal.
The advent of the playoff raises the question of whether non-playoff bowls will suffer, a question that sounds familiar to Peach Bowl president Gary Stokan.
“I remember back in 1998, when I first took the job,” Stokan said. “It was the first year of the BCS. I told (then SEC commissioner) Roy Kramer, ‘You’re creating a caste system in the bowls by having this BCS because the media is going to forget about the rest of us.’
“But I was wrong back then because if you look at our game from ’98 until last year, we set viewership records on ESPN and had 17 straight sellouts.”
Listening this week to Stokan’s comment, playoff executive director Bill Hancock nodded and predicted the new event “will have the same non-effect” on other bowls.
