Sports Frog

But I am sure Booty enjoyed his glorified scrimmage...

It remains one of the giant puzzles to me that the rest of college football lets themselves be highjacked by old men with a rose fetish. It is bad for your average sports fan on two levels:

1. As the system is currently set up, the insane desire for Pac10/Big 10 to the exclusion of almost all else in the Rose Bowl yields stinkers like yesterday's USC/Illinois fiasco. It was obvious to anyone who was conscious at the beginning of December that Missouri should be in a BCS game, but they were passed over because of the Rose Bowl's insane need to feed a tradition that no one really gives a shit about.

What should have happened yesterday? Missouri/USC in the Rose Bowl (and in that case, people might have actually watched more than three minutes before looking to see if Mythbusters was on) with Illinois in the Cotton Bowl against Arkansas. Instead, thanks to the shithole Rose Bowl folks, two crappy games were foisted on the country.

2. The second way in which college football has let itself be highjacked by the Rose Bowl is that the Rose Bowl (and the Big 10 and Pac 10 by all accounts) are the current primary obstacles to the playoff that 99.4% of the fans want. Getting from what was to what is (however unsatisfactory the current system is) took decades too long thanks to the Rose Bowl and its Pac 10/Big 10 obsession, and even now has yielded a system that really doesn't work.

So what should the rest of college football do?

My humble suggestion to start 2008:

Tell the Big 10/Pac10/Rose Bowl to go fuck themselves. If they want to be together that badly, let them. At least in any given year those two conferences will be guaranteed at least one bowl win.

Then, for the remainder of college football's conferences, put in a playoff that excludes the Big 10/Pac10/Rose Bowl. If the other conferences do that, I am guessing the silliness from those entities will end. For too long college football has ceded disproportionate power to Pasadena and two of its Big Six conferences. Time to take some back. In my admittedly pipedream scenario, the others come crawling back to the fold or can spend a decade or so playing its stupid pretend important game while the rest of college football does something meaningful and interesting.

I'd like to see that.