Bowl games made so much sense back when they were born early in the 20th century. In fact, they were a stroke of genius.

 

Back then, in the era of train travel, there was no way in hell eastern powers could play upstart western teams in the regular season.

 

A coast-to-coast round trip alone would take at least a week. If you wanted to see Harvard vs. Stanford or Columbia vs. USC, you, our football loving friends, where shit out o' luck.

 

But then somebody came up with a brilliant effin' idea: Let's get these teams together on New Year's Day. The kids are out of school, so they can certainly swing the trip to the West Coast from Michigan, New York or New England, and folks who have gone more than a month without football will take advantage of the day off to fill a big stadium to see this rare inter-regional battle.

 

And here's the best part: We'll play in sunny Southern California, where we're all but guaranteed good weather.

 

From a marketing standpoint, it was literal genius. The Rose Bowl, the first college postseason bowl, was a huge success. What was there not to love about it? The Rose Bowl offered great weather, great teams, great players and great matchups pitting college football heavyweights.

 

Other warm-weather cities followed suit. Before long, New Year's Day gave us the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Cotton Bowl in Dallas and the Sun Bowl in El Paso. The college football traditionalists among us still consider the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton Bowls to be the "Big Four" of the bowl season.

 

Other bowls came and went, including the short-lived Bacardi Bowl in Havana – once a huge tourist destination for Americans – that featured LSU vs. Havana University in its very first game. But for the most part, there were a handful of tradition-laden games played on New Year's Day.

 

And that was it.

 

And here's the part you shouldn't forget: Back then, the bowls were, in fact, purely exhibitions. Oh, sure, teams would play to win and prove their merit. But the AP would crown its champion before the bowls were played, and that's what went into the record books.

 

The bowls were more a matter of inter-regional pride ... and in a sport that never really purported to crown a champion, they were a brilliant success story.

 

But it's officially gone overboard. To use the parlance of pop culture, college football this year has jumped the shark. We have a textbook example of "too much of a good thing is a bad thing."

 

Barring a stunning string of last-second upsets, the 2006-07 bowl season will officially go down as the worst in history and final proof – as if we needed any more – that the entire bowl system, once genius, needs to be scrapped.

 

Here's why:

 

The Tournament of Roses committee hosted the first bowl in Pasadena in 1902. A handful of games were added over the years, but by the 1960s, you could still count all the bowl games on your fingers. Almost all of them were played on New Year's Day, making it the greatest day on the pigskin calendar for many football fans.

 

But bowl games have spread like pockmarks and acne on a chubby little teenager.

 

There are a record 32 bowl games this year. There were just 28 last year. The new, ESPN-created PapaJohns.com Bowl (yes, it's a real bowl) pitted South Florida vs. East Carolina, two teams even the most devout college football fans have rarely seen play, and for good reason.

 

The proliferation of bowls would be fine if there were enough good teams to fill them. But there aren't, which brings us to our next problem with the bowl system ...

 

Back when you had a handful of games, you were virtually guaranteed desirable matchups pitting great teams. But the proliferation of bowls simply tacks on shitty matchups between mediocre teams earlier in an ever-lengthening "bowl season."

 

A team simply needs to win half its games these days and it becomes "bowl-eligible." That expression has become a curse upon regular-season college football, too. When an announcer tells you before the game that Team X needs a win to become "bowl-eligible," you can assume without any further information that Team X is not very good.

 

Florida State, for example, went 6-6 this year and fielded what may have been the school's worst team of the past three decades. The Seminoles somehow ended up playing UCLA in the Emerald Bowl – a game we all remember fondly from our childhood back in 2004.

 

This game at least pitted two "name" programs ... but both ended the season at 7-6 and simply did not deserve a bowl game appearance.

 

Let's call a spade a spade here: The names of many of the bowls are a friggin' joke. The R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl? The MPC Computers Bowl? The PapaJohns.com Bowl?

 

We don't know what the opposite of tradition is, but these games just ooze it.

 

What kind of self-loathing team or student body is going to rally around its football program's appearance in the Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl or the Chick-fil-A Bowl?

 

They're not.

 

It's even embarrassing for alumni. When someone asks a Boston College grad where their team played this year, they have to hang their head in shame as they quietly whisper "the Meineke Car Care Bowl" under their breaths. It's literally embarrassing.

 

Bowl game names originally had some sort of connection to the cities that hosted them. Even if it were not the biggest game of the year, you could at least hold your head up with some sense of dignity when you told someone your team was playing in the Bluebonnet Bowl in Houston or the Dixie Bowl in Birmingham.

 

But who could tell you today that the city of Orlando hosts both the Champs Sports Bowl and the Capital One Bowl? These games could be played anywhere and nobody but the stadium ticket-takers know they're both being played in Orlando.

 

The bowls should find more clever ways to give sponsors some bang for their buck, and leave the shitty names out of the title of the game. It's bad enough that there are at least 26 meaningless bowl games.

 

When you dub it the PapaJohns.com Bowl, it simply broadcasts the game's meaninglessness and makes us never want to buy a pizza from Papa John's ever again.

 

Too many bowls featuring too many bad teams leads without fail to one thing: too many bad games.

 

There were 17 bowl games played from the legendary San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl back on Dec. 19 through Dec. 29. Only two were decided by less than a TD. Almost all of them have been blowouts.

 

In fact, here are the scores of the first 12 bowl games:

Northern Illinois was just 7-5 this year and somehow ended up in the Poinsettia Bowl against a Top 25 team, 10-2 Texas Christian. Northern Illinois got waxed by 30 points.

 

The R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl pitted two 7-5 teams from mid-major conferences. Troy, of the Sun Belt Conference (quick, name two other Sun Belt teams) crushed Rice of Conference USA, 41-17.

 

Rutgers went 10-2 and was one of the great stories of the 2006 season. They ended up facing 7-5 Kansas State in the Texas Bowl in Houston. The result was a crushing, one-sided victory by Rutgers, 37-10, in which the Scarlet Knights outgained the Wildcats by 317 yards of total offense.

 

That's not a bowl game. That's a humiliating kick in the crotch ... for K-State and for football fans.

 

It wasn't that long ago that the college season ended in the glorious bounty of New Year's Day. There were four, five or six games – each one pitting premier-name programs – and they'd all fight it out that day.

 

It was the pinnacle of the Pigskin High Holidays.

 

No more.

 

Oh, sure, there will be six games on New Year's Day. But the low-wattage Orange Bowl (Louisville vs. Wake Forest) won't be played until Tuesday night. Who's going to stay up late for that one?

 

Wednesday night, we at least have a marquee matchup in the Sugar Bowl (excuse us, the Allstate Sugar Bowl) pitting Notre Dame and LSU. On Saturday, there's something called the International Bowl in Toronto between Western Michigan and Cincinnati. It's like Canadians trying to win Americans over to hockey by holding an exhibition in New York between the Oshawa Generals and the Windsor Spitfires.

 

The GMAC Who Cares Bowl pits Ohio and Southern Miss next Sunday, after the NFL season has been whittled down to its final eight.

 

The fake and imaginary national title game – it's not even a bowl anymore, it's just the BCS Championship Game – won't be played until Monday, Jan. 8.

 

It's the first game for favored Ohio State in nearly two months. The Buckeyes last played on Nov. 18, in their epic showdown against Michigan, in what may prove to have been the real national title game. That's 51 days between games. It's like playing the conference title games on Jan. 21 and the Super Bowl in mid-March.

 

Bruce Springsteen once sang a tune called "57 Channels and Nothin' On."

 

That's kind of what's become of the college bowl season.