It's that time of year again.

If it's New Years Day, then it can mean just one thing.. We are smack dab in the middle of college football bowl season. At least the ones that matter.

Let's face it; if you play in a bowl game before Christmas, it is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Remember when going to a bowl meant you had a good season? Well, that's not the case any more. Not in the days of the Meineke Car Care Bowl, the Chick-Fil-A Bowl, the Insight.com Bowl, the GMAC Bowl, the PapaJohns.com Bowl, and the Eaglebank Bowl. Don't get me wrong.. I have nothing against a corporate sponsor for the bowls, (I'm looking for sponsors for my charity golf tournament), but when they don't even bother to name the bowls anymore, that's a sure sign that there are too many of them. They even had to go to Canada to find a site to play.

And getting back to the whole idea of earning a spot in a bowl being a sign of a good season, when you have teams like Notre Dame, who needed a win over Hawaii in the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl to finish above .500, it raises the question, what's the difference between the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame and Corn Flakes? Give up? Corn Flakes belong in a bowl! Let's be serious, winning 1/2 of your games is no accomplishment, and is not deserving of a reward, (unless you are the San Diego Chargers, and win the pathetic AFC West with a stellar 8-8 record).

Let's do some math. There are 119 teams in the NCAA D-I Bowl Subdivision. There are 34 Bowl games being contested in association with the 2008 season.

Assuming there are 2 teams in each bowl, (stay with me..) that means that 68 teams are playing in a bowl game this year. For those of you bad at math, 68 is just under 60% of 119.

That means that 6 of 10 college football teams are ending their season at a bowl game. If more people do something than don't, it makes it less unique. If 6 of 10 cars on the street was a Bentley, all of the sudden, a Bentley is just another car.

If the NFL decided its champion like the NCAA does, than last year's Superbowl would have been the Patriots against the Cowboys, and the Giants would have had to settle with the equivalent of the Cotton Bowl.

This is probably the only time I am going to say this, but Obama is right. There needs to be a play-off system for college football. D-I football is the only college sport that doesn't have an NCAA sanctioned national champion. In fact, the bowl games aren't even NCAA events.

People who work for colleges are supposed to be smart people.. That's why they work at colleges, right? (the old 'those who can, do, those who can't, teach' adage, can't be true, can it?) Let's let them get together and hash something out.

I guess it's just more fair if everyone wins. We wouldn't want to hurt the feelings of the team that lost half of their games, would we?


Oh yea, Happy New Year!