Lincicome: Judging the worth of bowls, champions and the defeated

It has been reliably reported that college football is still being committed when those of us who have paid passing attention assumed it ended somewhere in Boca Raton, as most things do.

As if 41 bowl games were not enough to tidy things up, still there was Miami the other night taking the breath out of Mississippi, one of which is used to such things. And Oregon, for some reason, was playing Indiana again with no explanation as to why.

Clearly some research is required since, this being January, the only question of football relevance is what happened to Kansas City, the usual mile maker for the month, having nothing to do with college football or college at all, for that matter.

So how is it that, semesters into a new calendar year, there are questions yet to be answered about which college teams get to bring their marching bands to the place usually saved for big events like the Super Bowl or Bruno Mars?

The short answer is three words: College Football Playoff, acronymed into CFP, not likely to catch on like Final Four or Stanley Cup, sounding rather more like a pharmaceutical hustle for invented maladies.

But CFP it is, no improvement really over its predecessor, BCS (Bowl Championship Series) which relied on undependable arithmetic and obscure computers, or the brief solutions like the Bowl Coalition or the Bowl Alliance.

The search to find a national champion of college football is a preoccupation that goes back several centuries. To paraphrase that Georgian (the era, not the school) oracle, Miss Austen (the author, not the Texas hub), “It is a truth universally (maybe she meant university) acknowledged that a football season must be in want of a champion.”

So on it goes, when, honestly, there was once a perfectly useful and usually accurate way just by asking coaches and sports writers to figure things out.

I was part of that poll system — writers not coaches — for at least 20 years and gave it my honest effort, judging teams I had not seen but getting it right more often than not. I admit voting for Brigham Young over Washington and Colorado over Georgia Tech and arguments still endure.

That was the beauty of the old way; doubt was not only allowed but encouraged. Clarity is a locked box.

The American urge for order brought to us to where we are, to brackets and playoffs. From two teams to four, to now 12, with promises of 14 or more, each increase further scalping the season, denuding rivalries, butchering conference championships, destroying the traditional bowl system, thereby making Shreveport completely irrelevant.

Notre Dame and Iowa State both refused invitations to bowl games. Players have refused to risk themselves, once including Caleb Williams, who skipped the Holiday Bowl, and Drake Maye who would not even go to Las Vegas.

Too much at stake, and too little to do with college football, rife now with transfer portals and entirely legal payments, something called NIL (name, image, likeness) bringing millions to what used to be called student/athletes.

The real motivation is pure American, of course, the pursuit of money. All the added bowls and added games and conference poaching is about money, not at all about the athletes, or about the education of the athletes.

What the CFP has done, just as the BCS did, besides turning the whole thing into a festival of farce and greed, is to diminish every other bowl, emphasizing disappointment rather than encouraging satisfaction.

The big game is isolated for emphasis, if putting it next to the first weekend of the NFL playoffs is not the shrewdest way to get attention, separating it from the scuffling world of the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl or the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl.

Instead of a seamless tournament, as is March Madness or even the Super Bowl elimination, college football remains a jumbled hodgepodge of unequal ambition and reward.

What an unfortunate and disturbing circumstance this is. Gloom settles upon the loser of a national title game much more heavily than it does the loser of the Wasabi Fenway Bowl. The world is upside down when happiness is easier to find at the bottom than at the top.