A dime a dozen
By Sean Hales
12-6-06

The Snow College Badgers joined the elite ranks of bowl championship football teams last Saturday.
Well, maybe not elite. After all, these days getting a berth in a bowl game is about as easy as catching some flu, cold or other malady from the rides at a county fair.
Let’s not take anything away from the Badgers; they won a tough game against a tough opponent, but what did it really prove? The Badgers will make it to the Zions Bank Top of the Mountains Bowl as long as they have a record of 6-4, just more than 50 percent. That means they will make the bowl as long as they’re a little bit better than mediocre. Maybe they should call it the Zions Bank Base Camp Bowl.
The NJCAA sanctioned eight bowl games this year, four of which featured at least one team that was not even ranked in the top 10. The Graphics Edge Bowl in Cedar Falls, Iowa had two games featuring no team higher than 12th in the NJCAA poll. Now there’s a bowl game with meaning.
The stated purpose of the Zions Top of the Mountains Bowl is not necessarily to provide a top-notch football experience. It is to showcase the Badger football program. Luckily this year’s game was a great contest, but does anybody remember Rochester?
And it’s not much different in the NCAA. The University of Utah football team is playing in the Armed Forces Bowl with a record of 7-5, once again, just a little better than mediocre.
See, here’s how the bowl system basically works: a school wants to ensure that its team has a shot at a bowl berth, so the school gets a sponsor corporation to front the capital (Zions Bank, for example), then gets the NJCAA or NCAA to sanction the event and, voila, bowl game.
But I don’t necessarily fault the schools, especially in the junior college ranks. The only input the NJCAA seems to have is making rules and issuing polls. So for schools like Snow, even a top-notch year won’t guarantee them a bowl appearance.
I say, let’s make bowl games worth something again. Let’s have the NJCAA get involved. Let’s have four bowl games at which the first- through eighth-place teams would face off (the ninth and tenth-place teams would act as alternates). The NJCAA would ensure match-ups between first- and second-place teams, third- and fourth-place teams, and so on.
And the system would work similarly in the NCAA, thereby getting rid of the transparently biased Bowl Championship Series, the pollsters of which seem to think no football teams exist east of California or west of Nebraska (except for Texas).
And the NJCAA and NCAA would benefit from reducing the number of bowls—supply and demand and all that. But, of course, at this point, when bowl games are a dime-a-dozen, (instead of worth their weight in gold) it takes a lot to post a profit.