The Stihl Chainsaw Dust Bowl?

The 2011 college bowl season started about a week before Christmas and is ending approximately a week after New Years. In 1960 there were 8 bowl games, in 1996 there were 18, this year there will be 34 or 35, depending on your source.

The reason for this small discrepancy is something only the football gods and ESPN really know. One thing is for sure, no one is volunteering to sit down and watch every game and count them up. You used to watch all the games, now there are people in white coats with butterfly nets waiting to catch someone merely attempting to do so.

In the old days, the best teams in college football were invited to play in a postseason bowl game. They were nationally ranked and it was a reward. This year there were more bowl games involving teams with barely winning records than there used to be bowl games.

With so many games to choose from, it’s never too soon to start looking at some guidelines to maximize next year's bowl experience for the avid fan.

In recent years it was safe to simply have a policy to not watch games involving teams with hideous records. But now, that would mean missing a lot of games and not putting the kind of dent in your couch that you had mentally committed to sometime before Thanksgiving.

A favorite standard around The Tattler has been to not watch games involving teams from schools we could have gotten in to. That gave you plenty of room for hours of viewing and edited out a few bottom-feeding institutions left over from the Viet Nam era when everyone was going to college to avoid the draft.

A new standard might be to not watch games involving teams from schools that the bad guys in those inbred-mutant-cannibal-chainsaw wielding slasher flicks could have gotten in to. This would allow you to edit out a couple snoozer games being played on rocky pastures in some third world corner of the dustbowl. Which would be the name of that game… and it would be sponsored by a chainsaw manufacturer, and…

Nevermind.

The important thing is to have some standards.