How does one spend the nation’s eminent decision day of the calendar year, when 84 teams hear their postseason amateur football fates?
Well, in the case of the author here, Sunday’s CFP (and bowl) selection day was spent in the gilded sweat lodge known as Scottsdale Fashion Square, where I found myself in an awkward predicament.
That predicament was having to find public Wi-Fi (thanks to the glass-enclosed sweat lodge having the worst cell service on earth) to discover where everyone’s favorite CFB teams would go this postseason.
As I hunched awkwardly over the plastic-covered excuse for a public bench on the upper level of The West’s Most Western Town (that’s actually Scottsdale’s nickname, I shit you not), I let out a slight bit of glee when I discovered that my alma mater would be playing a postseason contest in America’s Finest City (Tucson).
That’s because my beloved Colorado State Rams were sent to the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl (again, this is its actual name) to play Miami of Ohio (not Florida) on the CW Network.
While I could make some half-assed snarky comments here about the Bowl Industrial Complex, I’ll choose to take the high road here, simply because there’s no such thing as “ugly” football.
While we’re bound to get a fair amount of gridiron clangers between the Cricket Celebration Bowl and the CFP title game, that’s not to say that any of it should not be played.
That’s because the month-long celebration of Americana known as “Bowl Season” is a gift from the gods, where two teams are sent to towns picked out of some demonic city pairing generator, netting us geographic maladies such as Memphis and West Virginia playing in Frisco, Texas or Northern Illinois and Fresno State competing in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in Boise.
There are few days on the sporting calendar year (Selection Sunday, Super Bowl Sunday and … that’s it actually) that I look forward to more than the bowl selection day’s dot on the map.
While there will be plenty of what can only be described as an affront to the game of football’s spirit on display over the next few weeks, we have to remember to savor every last drip from the gridiron spigot.
That’s because before long we’ll be left with the NFL’s soul-less corpse to pick through, with zero marching bands or triple-option plays or blown coverage on a five-yard slant route to enjoy.
That’s why it’s paramount to avoid falling down the tired trope that there are “too many” bowl games, or that we must curtail the sport’s postseason “for the good of the game.”
To hell with that, I say, as tradition is just another buzzword that’s long since been thrown in the trash compactor of college sports.
Instead of tradition, embrace the modernity of having two random ass teams playing a midweek bowl game in Phoenix, Arizona.
Who knows, maybe you’ll rediscover the absurdities that inspired you to fall in love with amateur football in the first place.