Friday, January 1, 2010

Remembering When New Year's Day Meant Something

If you are over the age of 15 years old, you remember when New Year's Day was one of the biggest day in sports. We were treated to a smorgasbord of college football with several of the games meaning so much.

Back then, the Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Fiesta Bowl were all held on the same day. All of them. Now we get just a couple of them and then we give the others their own special night. Thank god that the Rose Bowl values some tradition and still stays on New Year's Day.

We also had several other bowls. Like the Cotton Bowl (which used to be a big game), Citrus Bowl (now the Capital One Bowl), Hall Of Fame Bowl (which is now the Outback Bowl) and Gator Bowl. All those bowls just littered all the networks on January 1st. And back then, more than one actually had national championship implications.

I mean, if we did that today, we would have the Rose Bowl with Ohio State vs Oregon, Sugar Bowl with Alabama vs TCU, Orange Bowl with Georgia Tech vs Cincinnati and Fiesta Bowl with Texas vs Boise State. Florida would have most likely been in the Citrus Bowl against, say, Penn State. Yeah, we now get to see Texas and Alabama face off head-to-head, but the other bowls are essentially meaningless. Um, there are five undefeated teams left and three of them know there's no chance they can win a National Championship. If we had the bowl set up like we did back then, only the Rose Bowl wouldn't have title implications this year.

Now we get 34 bowls and a "BCS Championship game" (note that it isn't a National Championship game). Can we get a playoff???

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