Hear Me Out...Do we really need a billion bowl games?

College football bowl season is right around the corner and ESPN has been airing their bowl season ads with Andy Williams' "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" playing over the top college football highlights. I agree with Mr. Williams, this is the most wonderful time of the year. Thanksgiving, all the Christmas festivities, Christmas and New Year's are some of the best weeks on the calendar.

One thing I don't enjoy during this stretch are the college bowl games. Let me be more specific, the non-playoff college bowl games.

The Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl and the national title game are the only games that matter after conference championship week. Outside of those three, there's no need for the other 37 bowl games.

College bowl week has always been meaningless, sure there's the handful of intriguing matchups between schools that generally never play each other, but for a majority of these games, we're getting a lot of Google Schools*. (*Schools that you need to Google to make sure they're an honest to god university or college, and not merely created to fill a bowl game slot.)

The College Football Playoff did help by making two more bowl games worth watching, but at the same time, it made the other 37 games even more insignificant. Essentially, the non-CFP bowls are dressed up exhibition games. It's like if you went to a restaurant, ordered a prime rib and when it finally arrives, it's buried under a pound of garnishment. It's unnecessary and should be considered a crime against humanity, because there's no need to dress up prime rib, it's prime rib.

It is surprising as money hungry as the NCAA is, that they haven't expanded the CFP. They could easily dominate the month of December if they expanded their playoffs. Just going to a 12-team playoff and starting the week after the Heisman Trophy, they'd run their usual course as they would with their bowl schedule and be done by the first full week in January.

A 12-team playoff isn't going to create an even bracket, which is part of the design because the top four teams are rewarded for their regular season success by getting a bye week and advancing to the quarterfinals. Meanwhile, in the first round of action, the remaining teams battle for spots in the quarterfinals. In total, you'd have four games in the first round, four in the quarterfinals, two in the semis and of course ending with the national championship.

The same committee that selects the current CFP, selects the teams for the expanded field. I know the committee catches a lot of grief but when you look at their body of work, they've done very well. Leaving out UCF last season and probably this year too, is the biggest knock against them and it's not that big of a deal because UCF is not beating Alabama. You could get an in his prime Daunte Culpepper to suit up for the Knights and they're still losing to the Tide by double digits.

CFP expansion across the board is a win for all involved. The games would be rating juggernauts, it's another recruiting tool for the schools that make it, better chance for upsets and drama and ESPN could actually fill a full hour for their weekly CFP rankings reveal show.

The biggest win though is the viewers. From a pure entertainment standpoint the current non-CFP bowls are marginally interesting at best. If you're not a current student, alumni, work for the university in some capacity, have a friend or family member playing or officiating in the game or a degenerate gambler, there's really no reason to watch the other 37 bowl games. They're kind of there as filler or something you turn on if you need background noise. I pity the people who have to take time out of their day to put together ads for this year's potential Boca Raton Bowl matchup between Tulane and Middle Tennessee. How do you hype up that game?

Expansion will bring drama about who are the deserving 12 teams but give me that any day. Rather than discussing if teams like UW, at 6-6 and begging for a bowl game, deserve to be invited to a bowl. Yes, the Cowboys played better down the stretch but they're still 6-6, celebrate that they closed out the season strong and get ready for spring ball.

Or even worse-than-average football team's begging for a bowl invite are the ones like Virginia Tech who, with no shame about it, scheduled a contingency game for today so they could keep their 21-game bowl streak going.

That move by Virginia Tech shows just how dumb bowl season is and that it's well past time to scrape all the garnishment off the CFP.