Examples of excess:
- Game duration It's so bad, that commentators remark about it off-the-air. See Jon Gruden's comment at the end of this column.
- Bowl game names Thanks to corporate sponsorships, the bowl names are ridiculously long. While I can live with "Discover Orange Bowl," it makes me feel dirty. Further, does anyone get excited about the "American Mortgage Music City Bowl"? This practice is distasteful, and anyone not associated with the sponsors will probably agree. Rather than staging all of the ancillary events associated with the bowl games, I bet we could think of a 1,000 better ways to spend that corporate money.
- Number of bowls Are we trying to turn college football into the Stanley Cup playoffs? Too many games involving too many mediocre teams. (Seahawks fans can rest easy now, no more jokes at your expense after your team beat the reigning Super Bowl champs on Sat.)
- Hype and preview shows I don't need to watch and listen to talking heads dissect a game for a half hour before kickoff. Just the games, please.
- Bowl season Let me get this straight -- a playoff system would negatively impact the academic performance of student-athletes. However, the length of time between the beginning and the end of the bowl season -- 12/18 through 1/10 -- is better than 4 weekends. Either give me a playoff system that runs those same 4 weekends, or give me back the biggest bowls all falling on 1/1, which would help to avoid hindering the student-athletes' classroom performance.
While I fully support a college football playoff system, I don't believe it would address all of these shortcomings. However, until that day comes when a legitimate national champion of NCAA football can be crowned through a playoff, let's at the very least clean up this mess.
It's the right thing to do.
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