Years ago going to a bowl game just after common season play was a enormous reward and a sign of excellence. Now it has develop into an absolute joke.
What has caused this sad state of affairs? I am glad you asked. The answer is income-grubbing bowl game organizers with dollar indicators in their eyes. It is all about generating revenue at the expense of respect for the game, the players, and their quest for excellence.
You see there are only 120 important college football teams in Division 1-A, what the NCAA loves to get in touch with FBS (the Football Bowl Subdivision). The NCAA brain trust loves a lot more and additional bowl games because they think it promotes the sport, and becomes a revenue magnet.
It also is killing the sport like a wounded animal running for its life right after being shot by a sportsman, not realizing that even if it escapes its hunter, it will bleed to death in the procedure.
The plethora of bowl games will eventually lead to football to loose its appeal as the number one spectator sport in America. That might sound unthinkable, but I have been covering or watching football for a half century, and can see history repeating itself.
I can bear in mind when baseball was king in America, and the powers to be thought it would by no means quit becoming THE sport of decision. Then basketball became true popular with rivalries at the pro level. Then เว็บข่าวกีฬาออนไลน์ became all the rage. I can recall when pro football games were not even televised due to a lack of demand. When you reside lengthy adequate and pay attention, you see the cycles creating.
Pro baseball made the error of expanding to far more and a lot more teams, and more and far more playoff games. Fairly soon the high quality of play was diminished, also substantially dollars was involved, and the game became driven far more by income than the quest for excellence.
Baseball club owners place crummy teams on the field and people today stopped coming. Some significant cities would not even assistance a lousy group. Yet another sport then became far more well-known.
Here is the rub: We have 120 significant teams and now the bowl season has been expanded to 35 games. That suggests 70 of the 120 teams will play in a bowl game. The circumstance has turn out to be so dire that the NCAA is talking about waivers due to the fact not adequate teams presently qualify to play in a bowl game.
The standard now is 6 wins amongst 12 games – that’s just a stinking .500 record which does not actually merit the reward of a bowl game. Heck, you applied to have to win 7 games to make it into a bowl game. Now there is talk of letting teams with a 5-7 record play in a bowl game because not sufficient may possibly qualify with 6 wins.
This is nonsense. One pernicious result of this is rewarding incompetency.
It reminds me of parents who all but force their kid to play little league baseball when the kid could care significantly less. He then plays 12 games on a team that loses just about every game and, as a reward, they give just about every kid on the group a trophy so their feelings are not hurt by their incompetence.
Parents also really feel compelled to have images taken of their little “stars” and have them put on baseball cards like they are some type of big league player. How stupid. The kid learns that getting a zero counts for almost everything. He feels like a absolutely nothing and is a absolutely nothing.
He is denied the blood, sweat and tears of working his butt off to essentially develop skills, find out to turn into a team player, and take pleasure in some actual, genuine life good results – a far far more important lesson that will help him throughout his life.
Final year, 71 teams became bowl-eligible by winning at least six games, and 68 of them played in bowl games. This year, 64 teams are bowl eligible and 20 may possibly be if they win once more. Bowl selections are to be announced on Sunday, Dec. 5.
Unless somebody with authority puts their foot down, we may well quickly see 60 bowl games with every single major college participating. That may well make a person a lot money, but the games will be terrible and the players will be cheated out of a thing pretty essential – the feeling of success that comes from difficult function and sacrifice, and can’t be replaced.