The Lesser Bowl Games

There are a lot of bowl games. Sometimes, people lament how many bowl games there are. There are 41 bowl games. If you count the national championship as a bowl game, there are 42. If you count the Celebration Bowl, an FCS bowl game, there are 43. If you count Division II and Division III bowl games, there are even more bowl games.

Something that puzzled me, when I learned there are bowl games in Division II and Division III, is that there are bowl games in Division II and Division III. Those levels have playoffs, do they not? And yet there Wikipedia is, listing the America’s Crossroads Bowl, and the Live United Bowl, and the Heritage Bowl, and the Florida Beach Bowl, all at the Division II level. There Wikipedia is, listing the Centennial-MAC Bowl Series, the Whitelaw Bowl, the Lynah Bowl, the New England Bowl, the Cape Henry Bowl, the Cape Charles Bowl, the Cousin Subs Lakefront Bowl, the Chapman Bowl, the Bushnell Bowl, and the Culver’s Isthmus Bowl, all at the Division III level. That’s a lot of bowls! Especially when you learn the Centennial-MAC Bowl Series had three different games in it this year.

What’s going on? I see two possibilities.

The first is the obvious one. While most of these aren’t on TV just yet, and most don’t have sponsors, some do have sponsors, most notably the Culver’s Isthmus Bowl (played in Sun Prairie—not at Camp Randall; I know some of you were wondering). There’s some sort of way to make money off of D2 and D3 football teams who didn’t make the playoffs, and God bless Adam Smith, we are going to find it. 43 was not enough. We need more bowls. Hell, there are probably high school bowls out there, right? This brings us to our second possibility.

The second possibility is nefarious. It’s the thing that makes us think there are probably high school football games out there calling themselves bowls. That possibility is that using the word “bowl” for a football game is fun, and that it makes the game more meaningful, and that it turns the game into a celebration of what these teams and their players have accomplished. In short: It’s possible there are so many bowl games because they’re meaningful to the athletes and coaches involved, young men (mostly) who love football and have worked very hard.

Hopefully, it’s the first.

Side note: I think a Freedom Bowl would be cool. Play it between Texas and California’s high school state champions. If Texas wins, Californians get to have guns for a year. If California wins, Texans get to do whatever drugs they want. States are laboratories of democracy, are they not?