“A 6-6 Ohio vs. a 7-5 Nevada — two programs with virtually nothing in common — is essentially the poster child for the idea that there are too many bowl games.”
Best name (given that there is no Ty-D Bowl, inexplicably): Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl.
When I was a fresh-faced lad, mankind had made almost no progress beyond fire. There were only four bowl games, and there was no cable TV nor streaming computers to view the action. Phones were decades away from becoming “smart.” We would sit by the telegraph with our hungover, racist uncles on New Year’s Day and listen for the short and long clicks that brought us news from the faraway Rose, Cotton, Sugar and Orange Bowls. Aunt Elsie would bring us body temperature milk she had just squeezed out of ol’ Bossy, and regale us with tales of how she had once seen the real Orange Bowl in a black and white postcard. Uncle Florian would take out his squeezebox and play some tunes for a private halftime show, often after he had emptied a pint of hooch into his glass of milk. It was difficult for those uncles to impart the proper racist attitudes toward “negroes” and “DPs,” because they only had a few minutes on a single day to share all of their wisdom, so they had to hold on to our sleeves and continue to mumble drunkenly as we stood in the doorway and tried to take our leave.
Today I can conveniently pass down that racism at a leisurely pace to my own nephews during 40 bowls on several weekends. It’s truly a tribute to mankind’s eternal progress.