Remember the jokes back in the day... The Toliet Bowl game.  Ha ha...  crude toliet humor about a Bowl game named after a toliet.  It seems these days that College Football might as well start naming these games as such, because of how meaningless they are becoming.

Back in the 1990-91 season, there were 19 bowl games.   That number has nearly doubled... and it isn't because there is great talent that needs to be given a stage.  Among the heros of the Bowl season, The Gator Bowl will pit .500 has-beens of Ohio State (6-6) and Florida University (6-6).  Oh please remind me to DVR that one!  But it isn't just big conferences that are piling into the Bowl Game phone booth... there is the Beef 'o Brady's Bowl which pits 8-4 Florida International verses 6-6 Marshall.

The Conferences (read Cartels) might as well remain the Bowl Series as the "Make a Mockery of the Not-For-Profit Status Bowl Series".  As has been demonstrated, these bowl games can typically cost colleges more money than they make, and those running the Bowls make a nice salary for a "non-profit" organization that does one thing a year.

And to make matters worse, because the Conferences is so busy piling colleges into phone booths, teams that had pretty good seasons Boise State (11-1), TCU (10-2),  Southern Mississippi (10-2) are rewarded with playing the likes of Arizona State (6-6), Louisiana Tech (8-4), and Nevada (7-5), respectively.   With the "smaller" school programs trying to expand their football programs, you'd think there would be emphasis on allowing them to play higher level teams.   But that sort of thinking is flawed as we all know that the Bowl games have nothing to do with determining football ability and everything to do with making money.

To really showcase the lack of quality these additional Bowl Games offer, in 1990-1991, 8 of the 19 bowl games had both teams not ranked.  That number is now 20.  Twenty Bowl games that have neither opponent being ranked.  Fourteen teams have records of .500 or worse, fifteen have records of 7-5.  That means about 2 in 5 teams in bowl games have a record of 7-5 or worse.   Of course, this is to be expected when you have around 70 teams playing in post season college football bowl games.   So we are to be treated to games like Iowa State (6-6) vs Rutgers (8-4), Mississippi St (6-6) vs Wake Forest (6-6), and Texas A&M (6-6) vs Northwestern (6-6).  The best bowl game would be the Fight Hunger Bowl which features an under .500 team in UCLA (6-7) verses, you guessed it... another (6-6) team, Illinois.

Personally, I can't wait for the innovation when they start putting together Celebrity Teams for some colleges to play against.   Until then, I guess College Football has a little bit more room to drop, in order to make a mockery of its own Bowl System.