John Walters

At last year’s Holiday Bowl, Bevo was rendered grounded beef.

The Longhorn mascot was ejected moments before the opening kickoff of that late December contest pitting Texas against Arizona State. The Holiday Bowl, you see, invites hundreds of local pubescent cheerleaders and band members to take part in its halftime festivities. The mother of one of them, noting the alarming proximity of the Longhorn’s long horns to her precious child, demanded that the beast be removed from the stadium.

Bevo and his handlers had made the 1,300-mile journey for naught. True, as cattle drives go, Bevo met a better fate than nearly all of his brethren. But as the two of us stood outside Qualcomm Stadium on that chilly evening, he chewed on his cud while I chewed on the irony: to be part of a non-BCS bowl game is to be left out in the cold.

Duck season. Wabbit season. Bowl season. Here are the numbers: 68 teams participating in 34 games in 14 states, two countries and one District of Columbia spread across five time zones and twenty days. God bless us, every one.

In the last two years alone, I have attended 14 different bowl games, which makes me 1) very lucky and 2) someone with a visceral appreciation of the term “too much of a good thing.” I fought sunburn at the Hawaii Bowl and frostbite at the Humanitarian Bowl — in the same week. Battled distraction at the 2006 Insight Bowl as Minnesota held a 38-7 second-half edge on Texas Tech amidst reports that Saddam Hussein was about to be hanged. The Golden Gophers would lose, of course, plummeting as precipitously as the deposed Iraqi dictator.

And as a grizzled veteran of three bowl games at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, I am in awe of Bevo simply for making it to the Holiday Bowl on time. Qualcomm is situated at the intersection of Interstate 8 and Interstate 15 and despite (or perhaps because of) that, it invites the worst traffic gridlock you’ll experience this side of the evacuation scene in Deep Impact. This year’s Holiday Bowl takes place on Dec. 30. If you are not already on your way, you may be late.

Do we really need 34 bowl games? Do we really need three major auto manufacturers in Detroit? The answer to both questions is, in essence, “No, but Detroit does.”

Bowl games are not special. They’re special interest. With the exception of the BCS Championship Game, bowls are simply seasonal businesses. They’re Christmas tree lots with higher overhead. Bowls are about approaching maximum occupancy in hotel rooms, restaurants and stadium seats in the cities that host them. If you choose to accrue some validation for your favorite team’s season due to them as well, feel free.

But that is not their purpose. There is a more direct path between a redwood fir in your living room and a virgin birth in Bethlehem than there is between a bowl game and the national championship. Don’t confuse the Meineke Car Care Bowl with the NCAA tournament play-in game.

Sixty-eight teams will play in the bowls, which is a greater number than FBS teams currently sporting winning records. To facilitate the “demand” for bowl teams, those that finish 6-6 are declared “bowl-eligible.” My question is this: Why stop there?

Twenty years ago, when ESPN still had just one channel and bowl games were still a reward for a season well played — as opposed to a yuletide season programming panacea for the worldwide leader — a program could be duly proud of a bowl invite. In fact, only a dozen years ago, Notre Dame finished 6-5 and declined a bowl invitation because it was seemingly beneath the lofty standards the Fighting Irish set for themselves.

Today? Notre Dame will be taking its 6-6 record to the Hawaii Bowl. When Charlie Weis was asked recently whether the Irish should accept a bowl invitation, he noted, first and foremost, that with a young team such as his the extra weeks of practice that a bowl game affords are highly valuable.

So, if at least half the bowl games have the same drawing power as a regular-season ESPN2 or ESPNU affair (Wake Forest vs. Navy in the EagleBank Bowl, anyone?), and if the greatest benefit to the programs is more practice time (many schools actually lose money by accepting bids to minor bowls), then why must there be a glass ceiling of mediocrity imposed?

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