The snake is finally eating itself in college football’s postseason.
This winter’s bowl season will feature a slew of 5-7 teams to fill out openings in the glut of bowls that mark the December calendar. There is a precedent for losing teams playing in bowl games, but the exceptions are so few and far between that it exposes how nonsensical the current situation is.
The most recent losing teams to make bowl games were 2014 Fresno State, 2012 UCLA and 2011 Georgia Tech. All those teams got waivers to go bowling at 6-7 because the seventh loss for both came in a conference title game. Before that the 2001 North Texas team qualified for the New Orleans Bowl at 5-6 because the Mean Green were the Sun Belt champions.
Before that you have to go all the way back to the 1970 and 1971 Tangerine Bowls. William and Mary and Richmond both went into the bowls 5-6 before losing to Toledo. The 1971 Memphis Tigers also went into a bowl with a losing record, 4-6 going into the Pasadena Bowl, before beating San Jose State.
Going even further back, the list is just as sparse. Hayden Fry led the 1963 SMU Mustangs into the Sun Bowl at 4-6. Fresno State received an invitation to the 1946 Raisin Bowl with a record of 4-5-2, and South Carolina went to the Gator Bowl that same year with a paltry record of 2-4-3.
That’s nine teams with losing records in bowl games since 1945, and there could be as many at five sub-.500 teams going bowling this year. There’s been an uproar over how this dilutes the bowl system, but how much more diluted can it get? The slate is already bloated at 40, and there are applications in the works for potential future bowls from Austin to Charleston, S.C., and from to Melbourne to Dubai.
While many in college football have been shaking their heads at the thought of teams with losing records playing in bowl games, the opposite stance is far more positive, and maybe more appealing.
Let the whole system balloon as big as it wants. Fill the bowl slate so much that even a 4-8 team gets a call. Aside from maybe 11 bowl games, the New Year’s Six games plus bigger bowls such as the Citrus, Outback, Holiday, Gator, and Sun, do any of them really matter? The aforementioned bowls, while not in the playoff rotation, either have been around for decades or are games that traditionally feature marquee programs.
No one is crowing about what teams were selected for the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. Zero fans are taking to Twitter to bemoan how their school was screwed out of a big payday and had to settle for the Boca Raton Bowl or the Camellia Bowl. The small bowl games exist mainly for ESPN to test drive new graphics and production elements, but a lot of the teams in them have used them as exhibitions to have fun and play freewheeling football because the stakes are so small.
Last year’s Bahamas Bowl between Central Michigan and Western Kentucky was a perfect example. WKU won 49-48 after surviving a 34-point fourth quarter by the Chippewas that was capped by a Hail Mary, three-lateral touchdown at the horn before failing on the two-point attempt to win it. It was madness, but it was madness that wouldn’t happen in a big bowl because the stakes are so high.
So let’s relax and just enjoy the December bowl games for what they are. They’re exhibition games that showcase smaller programs on a national level. Isn’t that good for everyone?
