Tired of being bowled over?

In a sport in which just 64 FBS programs recorded winning records, there are still 43 bowl games. Once a reward for a strong season, they're now a payoff for not sucking.

Wisconsin running back Chez Mellusi (1) scores a touchdown against Oklahoma State during the first half of the Guaranteed Rate Bowl on Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2022, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)

As I begin writing this, Oklahoma State is 3 1/2 hours from kicking off with Wisconsin at the Guaranteed Rate Bowl, Oklahoma is 46 1/2 hours away from meeting Florida State at the Cheez-It Bowl and, already today, Buffalo has defeated Georgia Southern at the Camelia Bowl, Memphis has topped Utah State at the SERVEPRO First Responder Bowl and Coastal Carolina and East Carolina have just kicked off in the TicketSmarter Birmingham Bowl.

Stop the madness.

Oh, sure, it will be interesting to see how a horribly diminished bunch of Pokes perform against a bunch of Badgers whose first head coach of the season, Paul Chryst, was fired the first week of October.*

---

* Indeed, by the time this column is fully edited and sent into the world, we’ll know if it was interesting or not … 24-17 Wisconsin, not that interesting.

---

And if you’ve been covering the Sooners as long as I have or, pretty much, live in our state, you have an interest in OU and FSU.

Yet how many of us knew about the others, two of them horribly corporately named and one of them, the Camelia, not, presumably because it’s one of 18 bowls owned and operated by ESPN Events and you can’t name all of them after the network, can you?

I didn’t know when they were happening, where they were happening or even their names until I read The Washington Post sports section on my phone Tuesday, stopping on Page 2 to look at the TV sports listings in our nation’s capital; pretty much interchangeable with ours, but for the Wizards and Capitals appearing locally there and the Thunder and Stars appearing locally here.

It got me to thinking.

How much more of this can we take? How much longer will there be a market for it? And, though too much is never enough for some things, like Rockford reruns and pesto pasta, bowl games aren’t one of them.