[QUOTE=roger]
Why the hell are there so many bowl games? Some of these games are a joke. Nobody wants to see Michigan play Mississippi State or OU play Troy. If a playoff is out of the question, which it shouldn't be, then 12 bowl games, MAX.
You might want to bounce that off Michigan, Mississippi State, Ohio and Troy fans as well as outlying conference / regional fans. Additionally, there's a reason these bowls are all around...They still get ratings and they bring commerce to the host cities.
Actually, like most things we can blame it on the Big Ten. Until the mid '70s, the Big Ten sent only one team to a bowl game -- it's champion went to the Rose, and everybody else stayed home. Then they realized they were missing out on a bundle of cash, so they opened the league to all comers. Soon, they were getting invites to all kinds of bowls and Woody Hayes was clobbering a Clemson player at the Gator Bowl. Suddenly, there weren't enough bowls for the rest of the big conferences to make the kind of money they wanted, and bowls started proliferating like rabbits. Personally, I'd like to see 20 bowls with no tie-ins (UConn really showed us they're BCS caliber) so the top 40 teams get to play.