Commenter Fred on the Exchange got me thinking about college bowl games today:
Does anyone else feel like I do that other than the BCS championship game, the rest of 'em are little more than exhibitions. That if you have something else to do or if it happens to be a nice day outside, you wouldn't be that disappointed to blow any of them off, or maybe watch a quarter or two and take a nap.
He's absolutely right, at least in my opinion. Back in 1996, when I first started watching college football (yes, I'm that young), there were 18 bowl games. According to collegefootballpoll.com there were 111 teams in division 1-A, so that means that a little less than a third of teams actually played in bowl games.
In 2008 there will be a whopping 34 bowl games, meaning that 68 of the 120 Bowl Subdivision teams get to play in the postseason. This means that plenty of six and seven win teams, many that are just plain lucky or slightly-above-mediocre, get to feel special in December.
Then I got to thinking - is the explosion in the number of bowl games something recent, or has it been going on for a while? I built a list of every single bowl game ever played (let me know if I did miss any) and the year they began. Then I totaled them up by decade, and the result is the chart below:
The Rose Bowl is the grand-daddy of all Bowl games. It was first played in 1902 and it took nearly twenty years before another Bowl game was started (that just so happened to be the now-defunct Fort Worth Classic).
It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1930's that the real Bowl game craze began. In 1935 teams played in the very first Orange, Sugar and Sun Bowls. The 1940's saw the biggest increase in Bowl games ever with eighteen, but sixteen of them are now defunct.
Seventeen more Bowl games were started between 1950 and 1980 and only five of those games are still being played.
And of course, from 1980 to the present we've seen 33 new Bowl games born. I think the main reason why we feel so inundated by college Bowls today is because many of the games since 1986 are still being played, even if they have changed names a dozen times.
So I'm with Fred. Let's go for less Bowl games and more meaningful match-ups. Maybe then people won't be quite as desperate for a playoff system.
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