By Joe Joe Wright

No, I am not talking about Hank Aaron’s jersey number or Reggie Jackson or John Riggins. The total number of bowl games is 44, including three college football playoffs. There are 128 Division I schools.  As a result of the greed in college football and America in general, 86 of them get to play in post season.  Really?!?  Many of them have losing records. Why, you ask?  It is all about the money folks, MONEY, but then again, isn’t it always.

Here are some of the latest doozies:  Quick Lane Bowl, Cure Bowl, Camellia Bowl, and the Boca Raton Bowl. Has anyone ever even heard of them? I know I haven’t.  Wow! It is ridiculous! I mean, come on now, really?  That is just plain silly. If you draw a straight line from Las Vegas to Nashville, Tennessee, all but five of the bowls are played in the southern half of America.  Can anyone say “Participation Trophy Society?”  Sometimes, I just get sick to my stomach. Georgia plays TCU in the Liberty Bowl this year. Founded in 1959 in Philadelphia, the Liberty Bowl celebrates its 57^th year and now makes its home in Memphis, Tennessee.  So starting on the 17^th of December, the bowl season will get kicked off with North Carolina Central vs. Grambling State in the Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl.  Oh my, if you all could only see how hard I am laughing.  Who in the world cares!?!  Let’s get to the point of this article. We can and should expand the college football playoffs to at least eight teams, but should be sixteen. This can be done without decreasing the number of regular season games. For example, round one could start this Saturday with eight games playing and then next Saturday, four more could play.  Then the players could all go home for the holidays instead of having to work for the school’s benefit in the 15 games played from December 19 through the 27.  I mean, let the kids have “Santa Claus” you greedy bunch of “Scrooges”.  After this, we would be down to two games and then one, just as we are now in the playoff system.  Oh, but the bowls lose money?  No they don’t!  Many of those bowls are being replaced with playoff games, which will have five times the viewers and the other games shouldn’t be played anyway.  They are awful, but the schools lose money for not playing in the bowl games.  No! They will not!  First of all, it’s not that much money in those bowls anyway, but get use to this term – revenue sharing. The SEC shares its money amongst all the member schools from bowl games and the same can be done with these games. Let’s take the 20 games played from December 17 through December 27. The total guaranteed payout to the 40 teams involved is only 32.8 million. The payout on each one of the first eight playoff games would be between 55 and 72 million.  Take that money and give a triple share to the participants and divide the rest amongst all the conferences.  It is way more money for the schools and reduces the ignorance level of our bowl games.

Either way, you look at it the college playoff systems is in a real mess and since they all about the money, anyway, here you go:

1. You can make more money.

2.  Kids get to go home for Christmas.

It is either do that or get this – there are nine more bowl games on the proposed list, with one of them in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.  Oh, my, my!