Sell Out Bowl Games

So did anyone hear about what happened in the Franklin American Mortgage Company Music City Bowl this year?  No? Well neither did I.  Probably because no one really cares.  In fact, the only place I could find any in depth information about the game was in a Vanderbilt school news website.  This is just one of the many games that it astonishes me are in existence.  There's the Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl, the Craft Fight Hunger Bowl, The Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, the Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl.  The list goes on and on.

All this takes me back to a Saturday Night Live skit I saw last year on this topic.  The skit, which unfortunately I cannot show for copyright reasons, was a fake commercial for things like the "Four Loco Trojan Mini How I Met Your Mother Bowl, which does not exist but sounds scarily similar to some real bowl game names.

 I think the skit and the fact that nobody ever talks about the more obscure bowl games highlights an important issue that occurs from having so many games.  Each game seems a little less important.  Getting into a bowl game is supposed to be a really big deal for college football teams.  It seems really strange to be that there can be bowl games that even college football fans have never heard of and don't care about.  Even though having so many games is a great money maker, I think it is in general bad for the NCAA.  If there continue to be additional games every year with more and more corporate sponsors, it could end up taking a lot of the magic out of being in a bowl game for both the teams and the fans.