I am an unabashed fan of bowl games, large and small. At their best, they are museum-quality specimens of a kind of lost American ballyhoo. The chubby boosters in garish blazers. The festival queens and their courts. The high school marching bands and the civic luncheons for baffled players who never have been in, say, Shreveport before. You will say that these things still exist, but the phenomenon has been devalued. Nobody wants to get excited about a consolation game. And this year, all the games outside the three mega-events that will decide the national title are simply the NIT. I do not believe that what the country really needed was one more gargantuan television event that makes the parasitical power structure of college sports even richer, that provides yet another boon to the national gaming-industrial complex, and that allows people who wouldn’t know Wallace Wade from Wally Cleaver to pretend that they care about college football.
Already, the new system has been embraced so enthusiastically by all the institutions of the tottering plutocracy of college sports that it has deformed the regular season. There is no way for the new system to make sense of the SEC West, for example, which is so fat with talent that it virtually has blotted out the rest of the country — so much so that it is entirely possible that a backlash elsewhere may force a lesser team into the field just so people won’t think the whole system is in the tank for a league that does, after all, have its own television network, with CBS Sports (virtually) serving as another one. It will not be long before we hear calls for an expanded playoff system because the current one is unfair to “the kids” who play in leagues less beloved by television executives. And it will become a genuine tournament, which means it will get bigger, louder, and all of its faults will become worse.
