As pledged, we have not watched a single moment of college football’s laughable bowl season this winter, unless you include the broadcast of the Armed Forces Bowl between Air Force and James Madison that was playing on the televisions at a bar we went to for lunch on December 23 with our family members. We don’t count that, for the record, as it’s impossible to avoid all coverage/news of the bowl games thanks to mediots.

Yet when we see a score like the one from yesterday—Georgia 63, Florida State 3—we realize once again how meaningless bowl games are … both to the athletes themselves and the fans, really. With the advent of the Bowl Coalition in 1992 and then the Bowl Alliance in 1995, the teams left out of the mythical national championship fray started caring less and less about these games. And then Bowl Championship Series …

Starting in 1998, the fringe bowl games really became even more irrelevant to the point that most schools started losing money on attending these games, as outlined in the excellent book, Death to the BCS, by Yahoo writers Jeff Passan, Josh Peter, and Dan Wetzel (who has completely surrendered his legit journalist card these days). We always look at two specific examples of the extreme problem here, as follows:

  • 1998: Second-ranked Kansas State was 11-0 and headed for the first BCS Championship Game when it suffered an inexplicable upset in the Big XII Championship Game against Texas A&M. Then somehow, despite a No. 4 ranking, the Wildcats were shunted off to the Alamo Bowl to face a B1G also-ran team, Purdue. Kansas State played a pretty meaningless game, losing to the Boilermakers. Also in this season’s end game, third-ranked UCLA was 10-0 and on a 20-game winning streak, when it had to play a rescheduled game in Miami against the Hurricanes to end the season. The Bruins lost, saw their chances at a MNC disappear, and somehow ended up losing the Rose Bowl to a much-inferior Wisconsin team. Stripped of motivation, both the Wildcats and the Bruins could have cared less about their bowl games—especially the Kansas State players, which deserved a lot better than the Alamo.
  • 2004: The California Golden Bears finished the regular season 10-1 with its one loss coming on the road by 3 points to defending Associated Press national champion USC, which was undefeated and headed to the BCS Championship Game. With the Trojans headed to the Orange Bowl, the Bears should have been given the Rose Bowl berth, something Cal had not achieved since the late 1950s. But some BCS shenanigans ensued, and the Texas Longhorns somehow got picked for the Granddaddy instead. The Bears, like Kansas State above, were buried in the Holiday Bowl and could have cared less, losing to a garbage Texas Tech team coached by our least-favorite coach. The Cal players were robbed of a dream, and they didn’t show up mentally for a meaningless bowl game. That’s standard now.

There are endless examples of this, of course, and it’s just gotten worse in this era of players skipping meaningless bowl games to protect themselves from injury that can cost them money in the upcoming NFL Draft. It’s also been affected the last few years by the transfer portal, as players entering the portal often don’t play for their schools in the bowls. So, that’s how we end up with the situation yesterday for FSU.

The Seminoles were unprecedentedly fucked out of a CFP berth by the corruption in the sport: the team had zero motivation for its bowl game against the two-time defending champs, conveniently set up by the CFP to ensure no non-playoff team finished undefeated. The savvy thing would have been to schedule FSU against undefeated Liberty, actually, as sort of a second-tier playoff—but that was too risky, wasn’t it?

[We’ve seen this before, where a team not invited to the bullshit “title” game/playoff finished undefeated and/or challenged the legitimacy of the CFP’s self-designated “championship” … although this truthfully began with the BCS charade of 2003 when No. 1-ranked USC was not invited to the “title game”! Twenty years later, not much has changed with the lack of transparency in this vile, corrupt sport, has it? Nope.]

The CFP, in its corruption and greed, sent the Flames to play the Oregon Ducks, knowing both team would lose to superior competition under the circumstances. Either way, the Seminoles lost their starting QB to the portal, a bunch of key players to NFL Draft prep/safety, etc., and the Bulldogs themselves perhaps feeling slighted as the two-time defending champs left out of the fray then sadly pounced on the situation.

On that note—Georgia is a classless football program after running up the score unnecessarily on both TCU in last year’s CFP “title” game and this bowl game against the Seminoles. One of the NCAA’s main position statements? Sportmanship: ” … the pursuit of the highest levels of integrity and sportsmanship is a core value of the NCAA, as the Association was founded in an attempt to address unsportsmanlike acts …”

Whatever. Just another lie from the NCAA and college football—we should be used to that by now, but we will never get used to as former athletes and coaches … never. We were raised with a certain code of ethics in sport, which seems to have been abandoned in this era of idiocy, mediocy, and every other corruptive vice known to humanity. Are we a dying breed? Maybe, but we also raised our own children this way.

So, Happy New Year, everybody; maybe 2024 be a lot better to you and yours than college football has been in 2023.