Sugar Bowl Blue: After Midnight We Be Turning Out The Lights

Patsy Cline sang that she liked walkin' after midnight, out in moonlight, searching.....

But then again, old Patsy wasn't playing football on a Tuesday night after midnight in the moonlight.

It seems the Sugar Bowl likes football after midnight on a weeknight. Perhaps, it's the start of a new fad funky Tuesday night football in the Big Easy?

Or maybe the Sugar Bowl Sugar Daddy—let it drawl off your tongue like a Doctor John —just needed a few more moments of television advertisement time to fill out that sweet non-profit Sugar Bowl salary.

The CEO of the Sugar Bowl earned $650,000 this year. Not bad for a non-profit, considering that the Head of the New Orleans Chapter of Habitat for Humanity only made $95,000, according to Time magazine.

Of course, the Habitat head did not have to beg the Big Ten boys to implement their suspensions for Ohio State's star players until after the Sugar Bowl.

Surely, there has to be some over time in those selfless acts?

Perhaps, the Sugar Bowl Big Daddy had to stagger out to a golf course somewhere and buy some Big Ten Fat Cats a few Hurricanes and crawl fish.  

It's not just the Sugar Bowl that's sweet:  according a to a new book, Death to the BCS, the CEO of the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl in 2008 took in $320,492 to fight his hunger for the following year.

All the Bowl Big Daddies rake it into their non-profit bellies, but must they make us watch midweek post midnight football?

How many times must we see that damn Geico lizard in order to pay some fat cats salaries?

Can't Tex Cobb crack that repetitious reptile with a grenade like he did that silly rabbit in Raising Arizona? 

What about the shrill, excitable Progressive Insurance girl must she invade the center of our midnight mind multiple times after midnight? 

Does Tex have extra grenades?

How often must we see that creepy commercial where the hot bikini chick morphs into Adrian Peterson while her bizarre boyfriend ogles her and grins like Pee Wee Herman? All that spot needs is a sweating Rex Ryan rubbing Peterson's soaking feet to complete its weirdness. 

A commercial is a commercial, but when the networks insist on extending games to drain the blood of commercial dollars, its gets boring, repetitive, and very late on the East Coast.

Do the Manning Brothers really need more money? Does ESPN? Does the Sugar Bowl CEO?

Must we be subjected to more tired talking Mike Ditka commercials?  Forty a night of Ditka—oh, the humanity.

How many times must we be reminded that sometime, somewhere in the distant future Auburn will finally meet Oregon? And that it will be the greatest game ever played, until next year anyway.

At least, thank Odin, someone seems to have slain that incredibly annoying Burger King Breakfast fiddling geek and his gang of moaning, marching, morning morons.

With the replay timeouts, the extended halftime, rambling pregame, sideline reporter silliness, babbling post game, screaming Chris Berman, the extra commercials to milk more money, and all the other bowl baggage the process has become painful.     

ESPN, a beast built on babble and senseless screeching, even seems to have exhausted its supply of moronic nonsense at the end of the night when Todd Blackledge decided to mention, for roughly the 447th time of the night, Ohio States record against the SEC in the BCS. 

Can't they cut it back and just play the game?

Can the CEO shave his salary and spare the poor viewers the painful rod of endless games?

And must they play it as late as a World Series games midweek?

Or are the seemingly bottomless stream of  bowls doomed to become games full of endless ESPN sound and fury that mean nothing and are played well past midnight, mid week, in markets where most fans are sleeping?