While We Are On the Subject

Now seems like the perfect time to wrap up all of our football related writing so let's go ahead and tackle my annual round-up of college bowl games with my usual focus on the interconference competition.  And from that perspective, this was the worst year yet in a long line of really disappointing years of college bowl games.  I guess it wasn't surprising though.  After a string of mid majors embarrassed the champs from the power conferences, the powers that be decided that if you can't beat them, take your ball and go home.  Even though their were small conference teams that arguably deserved a shot at the national title, they didn't even get a single BSC invite.  Boise State in the MAACO Bowl against a 6-6 Arizona State is an embarrassment.  It is amazing that any watches these games.  One thing that can be said for little guy is that they took their lemons and squeezed them into the cuts of the big boys.  In the 4 games that matched a power conference teams with an underdog conference team, the underdogs went 3-1.  What I love about this result is that the argument against including the mid-majors in the bowl games is that their high win totals are artificial.  They just benefit from weak competition.  That the 10th best SEC team would get 10 wins in the Mountain West.  Well, guess what?  The talking heads are wrong again.  These results once again show those tropes to be horribly wrong.  Penn State came within a win of taking the Big Ten and they got destroyed by Houston.  Wouldn't an LSU/Houston match-up have been ten times more interesting than what we got in the championship game?

So what did we learn from a bowl series that just paired mid-major against mid-major and power conference against power conference.  Nothing really new.  The ACC is clearly the red-headed step child of conferences.  They finished dead last in this years games (tied with the WAC) and further secured their basement position in the overall standing for bowl games since I started tracking these things.  My question is how is that the ACC stood strong through all of the conference realignment tumult while real football conferences like the Big 12 were on the verge of death.  The best thing we can do for college football would be to just disband the ACC and give their automatic berth to the Moutain West which is clearly more than just Boise State.  At 18-7, the MWC is second to only the SEC over the last five years.  Speaking of the SEC, I guess I have to give this one to the talking heads.  Yes, the SEC is the best football conference out there, although it does help when you get to play five of our bowl games against the Big 10 and ACC.  If only they had the guts to play the MWC.

One final note on this.  I will be starting the cumulative conference win totals over next year.  There has been so much realignment at this point that the conferences of next year will bear little resemblance to those that were part of my first 2007 round-up.  So crediting 2012 Pac-12 wins to the 2007 Pac-10 would make as much sense as saying, "I can't understand why the Pirates are so bad, they have Willie Stargell and Barry Bonds."  These conferences got plastic surgery, new identities, and entered the witness programs.  I mean West Virginia was last seen crossing the Rio Grande with a fake mustache.  So, we will start fresh.  That is if I even bother to care next year.  College football is horrible.

Final College Football Bowl Standings

Conference	W	L	GB
Big12	6	2	-
SEC	6	3	0.5
MAC	4	1	0.5
C-USA	4	1	0.5
Big East	3	2	1.5
MWC	2	2	2
Ind	1	1	2
Sun Belt	1	2	2.5
Big10	4	6	3
PAC12	2	5	3.5
ACC	2	6	4
WAC	0	4	4

Bowl Season Performance - 2007-2011

Conference	W	L	GB
SEC	30	16	-
MWC	18	7	1.5
Big 12	22	14	3
Pac-10/12	15	14	6.5
Sun Belt	6	5	6.5
Ind.	5	4	6.5
Big East	15	15	7
C-USA	14	15	7.5
Big Ten	18	23	9.5
MAC	7	15	11
WAC	5	15	12
ACC	15	27	13

This blog post is sponsored by Burt Johnson Construction.