Bowled Over

When crankyjewishguy (CJG) was growing up during the Fillmore Administration, there were, if memory serves, a grand total of five college football "bowl" games played either on New Year's eve or New Year's Day. There was the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville and the granddaddy of them all, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. What these bowl games had in common was that each featured two teams playing football against one another and each, except for Gator Bowl, was named for something that grew out of the ground. (OK, sugar needs to be refined from sugar cane, but the cane grows out the ground, so don't write CJG and say he made an error. CJG is infallible.) It wasn't just that the bowls were named for natural things, they were things that tasted, smelled or felt nice, too, provided you like alligator. There was no Poison Ivy Bowl, for example, and no Turnip Bowl.

The official Rose Bowl logo. See how fresh and wholesome it looks?
CJG just isn't sure why they placed the rose atop a cabbage.

The official Sugar Bowl logo. Needs work.

Today, of course, there are something like 850 bowl games which means every college football team in America, and a few from Kazakhstan, get bids to play in a post-season bowl spectacular, and some maybe even two. And gone are the days when bowl games were named for flowers, fruits, or the material used to make your sheets. Now the games are named after banks (Capital One), helicopter manufacturers (Bell), fast food restaurants (Chick-fil-A) and, CJG's personal favorite, the Brut Sun Bowl, named after a deodorant. (CJG doesn't know about you, but to him Brut Sun sounds like a Taiwanese gangster.)

As a result of this bowl proliferation, you get some really interesting match-ups in these games. You know, like the 1-800-FLOWERS Bowl featuring Northwest Bozeman State and the University of Southern Dade County (Ft. Lauderdale Campus), or the South Texas Police Benevolent Association Bowl pitting Oshkosh Community College against the Acme Night School for Advanced Trucking and Hauling, known to its fans as ANSATH. These lesser bowls feature more players in uniform than people in the stands, but each one is televised which means the networks have to scrounge up otherwise unemployed play-by-play announcers and color commentators. Usually, these guys know nothing about football so you hear them say things like, "that touchdown gives the Hackensack Hackeysacks an insurmountable 14 run lead," or "the penalty is declined and there will be a do-over." When CJG watches the announcers calling the Swingline Stapler Bowl, for example, he wonders what could these people possibly be doing for a living during the 364 days of the year when there isn't an utterly obscure football game on their agenda.

CJG also wonders what some of these sponsors get for the millions of dollars they put up to name a bowl game after themselves. Take Bell Helicopter, for example. Exactly how many people watching the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl are in the market for a helicopter, especially in this economy? And how many are going to drive past a nice little Italian bodega to get to a platter of mini corn dogs at Beef 'O' Brady's just because Beef 'O' Brady's attached its name to a football game between Rutgers and the University of Central Florida? (Rutgers won, by the way.) CJG never even heard of Beef 'O' Brady's until he looked up the 2010-11 bowl schedule on the Google machine three minutes ago. And what's up with the apostrophes on both sides of the 'O'? Even the Irish are limited to one apostrophe per name and this place has three. Is it supposed to make the name readable in both directions? Anyway, as CJG just said, he'd never heard of Beef 'O' Brady's until...well, now it's four minutes ago...but he's sold.

Now that Beef 'O' Brady's has sponsored
 a college bowl game, CJG is a customer for life...

...and he's gonna get there in his new Bell Helicopter as soon as his ship comes in!