Bowl season is officially upon us.
On that note, hand me one. I think I'm going to puke.
The BCS bowl games were announced Sunday night, giving us riveting matchups like Virginia Tech vs. Kansas and Illinois vs. Southern California.
Generally, the BCS games are more interesting than the rest of the bowl schedule. It's only fitting that things would be reversed in this wild year of college football.
Give the bowl lineup a quick scan.
Games like Auburn-Clemson, South Florida-Oregon and Wisconsin-Tennessee will probably be more competitive than the Sugar Bowl (Hawaii-Georgia) or even the BCS Championship Game between LSU and Ohio State.
I'm not a fan of counting teams out of bowl games before they are played. Call it the Boise State rule. No one gave the Broncos a chance against Oklahoma in last year's Fiesta Bowl, but they won.
With that said, the BCS games all have the potential of being blowouts, besides maybe the Fiesta Bowl between Oklahoma and West Virginia.
The team with the biggest gripe may be Missouri, who will watch Kansas play the Hokies in the Orange Bowl. The Tigers defeated the Jayhawks one week ago and finished ranked ahead of them in all three of the polls that are decided by human brains instead of wires.
That game would have more of a spark if Missouri were involved, and the rest of the weak pairings can be blamed on the stipulation that no more than two teams from each conference can make a BCS game.
If the rule didn't exist, we might be watching USC play UF instead of the Illini.
Well, at least we don't have to watch Notre Dame.
As far as the national title match, the BCS system didn't do a bad job. The Buckeyes and Tigers were the logical choices for the championship, but plenty of others could make a case for why they deserve to be there.
That's why, once again, the only way to truly decide the top team in the land is a playoff.
You know, that thing that all the other sports leagues, including Little League, use to determine a champ.
Some argue that because of the parity of this season, where a No. 2 team lost to an unranked foe six times, a playoff system wouldn't work.
Seriously, people say that.
A playoff would work better this year than most others. A four-, six- or eight-team playoff would be unpredictable, unlike the current slate of potential massacres.
We won't know for a while what changes, if any, are in store for the current system.
Only one thing is for sure.
Ohio State is going to get clobbered again in the national title game by a Southeastern Conference team.
