Five Reasons Why College Football Bowl Games Matter

 




Except for the National Championship game, all the bowl games are technically exhibition matches in the sense that they have no bearing on conference standings or the national championship.

However, these exhibition games do have significant importance outside of bragging rights, boondoggle vacations for fat cat boosters and increased revenue for local bars, escort services and strip clubs.

Here are five reasons the bowl games really matter:

1. The national television exposure is crucial for recruiting.

The success of a college program is largely dependent on how well it recruits. Few things help recruiting more than the national exposure gained by participating in, and winning, a holiday bowl game.

2. The results help determine next year's pre-season ranking

This is the one time of year you can be assured that most of the people who vote in the polls are actually watching the games. This is an especially good time to impress the coaches, who in most cases are for the first time really watching the teams they have been voting for all year.

Two of the main elements that go into determining a preseason ranking are how many returning seniors a team has and how they finished the previous season. A team's bowl game is their best chance to make a statement to pollsters about how they finished their season.

3. The games give fans an opportunity to watch teams that normally get left out of the regular season Saturday television rotation.

Because of regional TV coverage, it's even difficult to watch some of the top teams if you aren't close to their local market. Even if you have ESPN game plan and two televisions next two each other like Parkov, there are only so many games you can watch at once on regular season Saturdays.

I would like to stop here and give a round of applause for ESPN's Thursday night football, which gives us a similar opportunity throughout the regular season. It's the biggest improvement in college football broadcasting since 1984, when the Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA in an anti-trust lawsuit, thereby liberating fans from the longtime straitjacket of just two regional games every Saturday afternoon on ABC. As great as that regime was for Keith Jackson's career, it sucked for the rest of us.

4. Provides an excellent indicator of relative conference strength

As we know, inter-conference games between ranked teams are hard to come by. And credit to Ark_Razor to pointing this out in a comment.


5. What the heck else are you going to do on New Year's Day?

Enjoy everybody!!! It's going to be a long wait until Labor Day.


By the way, anybody notice the hype going into the NFL's "big game" Sunday night between the Chargers and Broncos? One team is sub-500, the other is one game over .500 and they are fighting for the last playoff spot. At long last, some real regular season drama for the NFL!

In college football, that game is barely the equivalent of a regular season meeting between two teams ranked in the 10-20 range. That's why we have the best regular season in sports!