The holiday season has come.
Get ready for light-strung trees, Temple Square dates and presents. Oh, and bowl season.
For the span of about three weeks, televisions across America will be bombarded with nearly non-stop football, as dozens of teams will travel to insensible destinations to participate in nothing more than a glorified scrimmage. Yay!
Look, I love football, and when I was a tyke I used to look forward to every holiday break so I could consume the most gridiron action as possible. Ah, the innocence of youth.
I thought these games were important. I thought they were games filled with high stakes. I thought they mattered. I was wrong.
As I have grown, I have seen many bowls come and go. As more and more bowls were created, a realization came to me — bowl games are stupid.
I get the reward for the team. They get to go somewhere new and play another game of football. But why do people tune into these things?
The bowl season continues to grow because more and more companies sign up to sponsor them. And these sponsors continue to sign up because for some asinine reason, people tune in. Bowl games make money, pure and simple. So sadly, they will continue to happen.
To see the unimportance of this wonderful season, we have to look no further than the Utes.
Utah played a grueling schedule and seemed to play a top-25 opponent every week. The Utes squared off against UCLA, USC, Arizona State, Oregon and Arizona — all ranked squads — throughout the course of the regular season and somehow managed to escape this schedule with an 8-4 record and earn a trip to the bowl.
The Utes’ reward for such a season? The Las Vegas Bowl, with a matchup against the second-best team in the Mountain West — Colorado State. Yeah, that’s getting the heart going.
Utah didn’t make a bowl game at all the last two seasons, but really, is this season all that different? The entire campaign, the Utes were playing in meaningful games, and not just on a conference scale, but a national one. Utah’s games against ASU, Arizona, UCLA and Oregon all helped shape the playoff conversation. It was a thrilling season with high-stake games that allowed fans to dream of greatness.
So after participating in games with actual importance, Utah will now lace up the ole’ cleats in Vegas against the Rams to the yawn of the few watching.
Sure, call this a reward for the players because I’m sure they’ll have a grand time participating in the bowl festivities and getting to play one last game this season, but what about for the Utah fans? There is no way to look at the Vegas Bowl, other than a step down in competition.
The bowl season has been watered down. There are too many sponsors, too many teams and way too many games. Putting a sponsor on a holiday season exhibition game does not make that game important. It is what it is — a meaningless game, set up to make some extra money.
The bowls are a holiday tradition, but some traditions should be changed.
@millerjryan