Monday, January 03, 2011

Bowl Games




Arrrgggghhh!  The agony of defeat!
  

      I am finally tired of college football.
      I'm sorry, folks, but it’s just gone over the top now. I mean, last night I was watching the “Frito-Lay-CrackerJacks-On-Sale-Now-At-Your-Local Stop-N-Shop Bowl" pitting the hapless "Fighting Mollusks" of  Wotsitoo U against the loss-ridden Bean Station College “Raging Roosters”.

     Of course I'm exaggerating. But I do suffer from Bowl Game Overdose!  Whatever happened to the good old days when you had five bowls and they were all played on New Years Day? And the names made sense, too, like Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl. It was bad enough that my beloved (but pitiable this year) Tennessee Vols had to play an equally nondescript North Carolina team in the superfluous “Music City Bowl”. But then some fat cats went and sold their name rights to, of all things, a mortgage company, and it became the linguistically challenged “Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl”, or call it the the “13-syllable-hard-to-say-Bowl” for all the difference it makes.

     Sure, I’m a little bitter about how the game came out. “We wuz ROBBED, I tell you…. ROBBBBED!” But that’s another story.

     Do you know why they call them “bowl” games? Back in 1916, Michigan and Stanford began the tradition of playing in the “Tournament of Roses” game. It was kind of an East-West thing they did at the end of the year. Then they built Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California, which, naturally, was shaped like a oval bowl. The name stuck. Now they call any major football event a “bowl”. Like when brothers Peyton and Eli Manning played against each other earlier this NFL season. They called it the “Manning Bowl”. And isn't the Auburn-Alabama game called the “Iron Bowl?”

    I have a few more bowl games to add to the already glutted post-season college football landscape:

TOILET BOWL - game for the two teams with the most penalties (they play dirty, get it?)
EMPTY BOWL - game for the two teams with the poorest attendance records.
DUST BOWL – game for the two teams with the worst offensive records (all they do is just run up and down the field, kicking up dust but never scoring, get it?)
FAST FOOD CAREER BOWL – game for the two teams with the worst academic records.
FURTHER REVIEW BOWL - game played just for officials. They get to review every play. The game will last two days and there will be no clear winner. Even the end of the game will be reviewed until the score becomes moot because no one cares (You would have to have seen the “Franklin-American-Mortgage-Music-City-Bowl” to understand).