So many bowl games, still too much time

How bored do you think Ohio State is right now?

Imagine, 51 straight days off. Here you… How bored do you think Ohio State is right now?

Imagine, 51 straight days off. Here you are, better than everybody else in the country in terms of doing what it is that you do, and you don’t have to go to work for nearly two months.

I’m sure the Buckeyes are just chomping at the bit to get back on the field. Since they dispatched Michigan back on Nov. 18, the team has been watching the rest of the country talk about who should be playing them in the season’s biggest game. That debate ended last weekend, but there is still an entire half-season between now and when the national title game actually takes place on Jan. 8.

This is my biggest complaint about college football. It has so little to do with the Incredible Machine-type contraption that is the BCS, and it has even less to do with which team’s head coach feels he needs the mic to whine like Steve Urkel each and every week. The layoff between the end of the regular season and the national championship game is just too stinking long, and it’s all because there are too many feel-good bowl games.

You know this part of the season – it’s called the meaningless bowl season. I prefer to think of it as the time where Pitt football is prepping for next year.

Look, I get the idea of being thrilled just to make a bowl game. I watched Rutgers take the field last year when nobody thought the school from New Jersey still played football.

Even Pitt was this enthralled to be playing for a bowl when it got to the Liberty Bowl in the mid ’90s. It didn’t really matter that the Panthers got blown out by Southern Mississippi; they were there, something they couldn’t say in the years leading up to that game. Bowl games are a nice measuring stick for lower-tier football programs, and that is what Pitt was at the time.

But there are just too many of them now. There are so many to the point that I forget the season is even still going on when the BCS games get going. By then, it’s supposed to be basketball season.

Consider some of the games we have to sift through just to even start talking about the BCS games in early January. Between the dozens of SportsCenter segments that show whiney Michigan personnel and over-caffeinated analysts begging for a playoff lie some of the most pointless games of the season, complete with very poorly thought-out names.

Rice and Troy square off in the R’L Carriers New Orleans Bowl three days before Christmas. Here are two programs that will forever be in the we’re-just-happy-to-make-a-bowl-stage. Give me one reason to watch, other than the fact that there might not be one defensive stand.

New Mexico plays host to San Jose State in the New Mexico Bowl. Are you kidding me? This would be like Hawaii playing in the