Buried within this story about the Mountain West Conference potentially getting an automatic bid to a BCS bowl in a couple of years is BCS executive director Bill Hancock's suggestion that future non-championship bowl games need to be held on weekends to avoid sparse crowds, like the paltry 28,000 or so that showed up for the Orange Bowl between Georgia Tech and Iowa this past January.
Perhaps Hancock should acknowledge the two actual problems: the BCS took away the tradition of New Year's Day bowl games and made every bowl except for the championship game irrelevant.
Why would you want to attend a bowl between Georgia Tech and Iowa if neither team is playing for anything but pride? It's like attending a Week 17 NFL game between two teams from opposite conferences that are both out of the playoff picture.
New Year's Day used to be all about college football. I remember waking up at 10 am and putting two televisions next to each other and watching bowl games all day. Now? Well, there's a couple games in the morning, the Rose Bowl in the afternoon and usually another bowl at night. And none of these bowls mean anything. And the coolness of watching all of the bowls together is gone.
Secondly, why would anyone attend, say, the Orange Bowl when the championship game is in the same location a week later? If you live in Miami and you can only go to one, which one are you going to? Of course no one is going to pick the Orange Bowl because it means nothing.
I know the BCS isn't going anywhere so I'm not going to suggest scrapping it as a solution (even though that is the real solution). What they should do is have four or five stand-alone bowls with each rotating as the championship game, as they used to do prior to the creation of the championship game being a second bowl in one location. The Orange, Fiesta, Sugar and Rose would each be one and if a fifth is needed in order to make it more possible for smaller schools to qualify, add the Cotton. Two bowls are played on January 1 with a 4:30/8:30 doubleheader, the next two are played on January 2 with a 4:30/8:30 doubleheader and the championship game is played on January 3 and 8:30.
Problem solved. Spreading these bowls out over a week only kills everyone's interest because it's too many meaningless games spread out over too many days. Plus, with most people having to return to work on January 3 or 4 after their winter holiday break, getting people to travel to a bowl for a January 5 game never had a chance of succeeding.
By the way, this is how the BCS did it from the 1998 season through the 2005 season. Four stand-alone bowls spread out over three days. And people seemed fine with that, even if they didn't like the system as a whole. People actually went to the games. People actually watched on television. Maybe going back to that would solve the problem. Unfortunately, that won't be the case for the near future. According to their website, the championship games will be played on January 10, 9, 7 and 7 the next four seasons. And, of course, one site will host two games. So the problems Hancock have will remain, no matter what day of the week the non-championship games are scheduled.
As always, the BCS has the wrong solution for the problem but why should any of us expect anything different?
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