Idiots Write About Sports

When I was a young lad growing up on the mean streets of Westlake Village, California, one of my favorite sports-related traditions tied into this time of year was when the Los Angeles Times would print its weekly table of projected college football bowl game pairings. Maybe it was because the approach of the bowl games heralded the arrival of Christmas. Maybe it was because the younger me enjoyed the Times’ spot illustrations of roses and gators and other bowl logos (“So that’s what a sugar bowl is supposed to look like…”). Or maybe it’s because I was a weird little kid, which stands to reason since I grew up to be a weird, not-so-little adult. My point being: I have fond memories of the L.A. Times’ bowl-game table.

I still like bowl game projections, even if no one draws representations of the game logos anymore. (Guess it’s hard to come up with a stirring illustration of a tire to get people excited about the Continental Tire Bowl.) I may have no plans to watch Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl, but I sure seem to care that CNN/Sports Illustrated predicts Miami and Florida will square off in the New Year’s Eve second-tier bowl game.

I may not have the odd pleasure of discovering how an L.A. Times illustrator may have chosen to graphically represent the EV1.Net Houston Bowl (projected participants: Iowa State and UTEP), but that’s merely given way to a new tradition: figuring out which bowl games have picked up new sponsors and which ones from previous years have been dropped entirely (wherefore art thou, Seattle Bowl?).

Looking at this year’s bowl schedule, no games appear to have gone the way of the Bluebonnet Bowl, the California Bowl, the Garden State Bowl and other defunct bowl games. But we do have some new sponsors, meaning new, even more unwiedly names for football games even alumni will be hard-pressed to care about.

There’s some sort of contest scheduled in Orlando on December 21st called the Champs Sports Bowl. This is the Bowl Game Formerly Known as the Tangerine Bowl, which was created a few years back because the Bowl Game Originally Known as the Tangerine Bowl changed its name to the Florida Citrus Bowl. That game is now the Capital One Bowl. However, both games that used to be known as the Tangerine Bowl will still be played inside the Florida Citrus Bowl, which used to be called the Tangerine Bowl.

Got all that?

The other bowl to change its name is the MPC Computers Bowl. At first, I thought this was an entirely new game, but it appears to be a renamed version of the Humanitarian Bowl, waged on the garish blue astroturf of Bronco Stadium.

One wonders, if illustrators were still charged with coming up with bowl game logos for the L.A. Times, what logo they’d produce for the MPC Computers Bowl. A computer, I guess, though I like to think the logo would be an alumni shivering at the thought of spending the holidays in Boise.

As you may know, Notre Dame fired Ty Willingham and ESPN's take is that the Irish are now just another win-at-all-costs school. I noticed Jim Caple wrote an article. My brain fried from acounting work, I figured maybe he wrote something intelligent this time.

Hack Alert. Fake-quote column. I'm truly sorry.

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