It’s an old refrain nowadays. We hear it often, in one version or another. There are too many bowl games. Bowl games reward mediocrity. Bowl games are participation trophies. 6-6 (or now 5-7) teams don’t belong in bowls.
The bowl season keeps expanding as more sites look to host games, more sponsor are finding games to pay for, and more fans are watching bowl games. The explosion of bowl games has been amazing for college football, drawing attention to teams that usually wouldn’t get this much attention. It’s also been awesome for fans because, be honest, what fan really doesn’t want to see more college football? The arguments for bowl expansion have soundly defeated the arguments against, as have pure market forces.
That is, until now. This year, there are 40 bowl games (41 including the National Championship Game). This season shows us that 39 is probably the absolute limit.
The Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl will not be televised nationally (even if you have a good cable package) and will feature two teams from the Mountain West Conference. MWC commissioner Craig Thompson pointed out, and rightly so, that the lack of regulation of how to select the eligible 5-7 teams led us to this situation. If all 6-6 teams were placed first, we probably would have ended up with Minnesota vs Nevada in this game and Colorado State vs Central Michigan in the Quick Lane Bowl–two matchups that probably would have had better television appeal and will probably be better games. But it is what it is and this is what we get; we will see (or probably not see) a conference matchup in bowl for the first time in over three decades. At least it’s not a regular season rematch.
On to the matchup itself. Colorado State is a moderately talented mid-major team that was clearly coached incredibly well by Jim McElwain the past few seasons. With McElwain now at Florida, the Rams seem to be falling back to earth. They are still in the top half of the Mountain West, but they are clearly not the same team as they were under McElwain. They did not have the raw talent to be a 10-win team when McElwain was there, as evidenced by their blowout loss to Utah in last year’s bowl game, but McElwain brought them to that plateau anyway (sounds kind of lack McElwain’s Florida team this year). People expect far too much from Colorado State right now, but they are definitely a program heading in the right direction, even if they are suffering from the loss of a great coach right now.
Nevada, on the other hand, hasn’t quite been the same since Chris Ault’s retirement in 2012. The program did not successfully build off the success that Colin Kaepernick and a Top 15 season brought them, which has to be a tremendous disappointment to the administration in Reno. The program is in a bowl for the second straight season, as the Wolf Pack got walloped by ULL 16-3 in last year’s New Orleans Bowl. (Chris Ault is an amazing coach who invented the pistol offense, by the way, and will coach Rhinos Milano of the Italian Football League this coming season; that should be fun to check out.)
Both of these teams are run-heavy, though Nevada does it more out of an option set from the pistol formation while Colorado State is a pro-set offense. The player in this game to watch will be Rashard Higgins, Colorado State’s NFL-caliber receiver. Higgins missed Colorado State’s game against Minnesota, which the Rams lost in overtime. In fact, both of these teams went 0-2 against Power 5 competition, with Nevada getting blown out by Arizona and Texas A&M and Colorado State losing in overtime to each of Minnesota and Colorado.
Being a conference matchup, this game does not have much going for it in the way of bragging rights or fan interest from different areas of the country. But it is probably going to be meaningful for the players and Tucson is a beautiful city to play a football game in in December. Maybe the Arizona Bowl could even someday become a premier Group of 5 bowl. For now, though, it’s a bowl that feels extraneous. And if you want to watch it, well, you should hope that your local The CW or MyNetworkTV affiliate chooses to air it. It isn’t being broadcast on any channel. It is being broadcast by ASN (American Sports Network), which is a network that produces games which are then aired by partners owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group (like The CW and MyNetworkTV). To say the least, the Arizona Bowl is starting from the humblest of beginnings. Let’s hope that it provides an amazing atmosphere for fans or a compelling game (for those who can see it), because without either of those, it will without question become the game that we will all recognize to have been one bowl too many.
