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What? No Tidy Bowl Bowl?
A post-modern, post-season pre-mortem
College football’s bowl season kicks off Tuesday, December 17, with the Scooters Coffee Frisco Bowl at Toyota Stadium in Frisco, Texas. West Virginia plays Memphis State.
I have never heard of Frisco, Texas. And I wouldn’t be surprised if most of you had never heard of Scooters. If this chain of boxy little coffee drive-throughs has an outlet in Georgia, where I reside, I haven’t seen one. I only know the name because they’re popular in Omaha, where my wife has relatives.
I remember when only corporate giants like Fed-Ex and Frito-Lay sponsored post-seasons bowl games. For that matter, I remember when bowl games didn’t have sponsors at all. The Rose Bowl was just the Rose Bowl, the Sugar the Sugar.
But more and more cities and sponsors are teaming up to stage post-season match-ups now that the NCAA has allowed college football to drop all pretense of being anything other than a grooming round for the NFL.
Who knows? In another five or 10 years, every town with more than two traffic lights will have its own bowl — the Orkin Pest Control Bowl in Valdosta, Georgia, the Elvis Is King Bowl, Tupelo, Mississippi.
There’s a Myrtle Beach Bowl this year. Myrtle Beach proper has not quite 40,000 people.
