SISNEY: Take the sports fans bowling

The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl should have been renamed the Kraft Celebrate Mediocrity Bowl.

Simply put, no bowl game should feature teams with 6-6 and 6-7 records before their game. Illinois, for crying out loud, finished 2-6 in Big Ten play. UCLA, a football program long in decline from the days of Terry Donahue (UCLA head coach from 1976-1995), had a losing record and ended its season 6-8 with a 20-14 loss to Illinois. Aside from partisans of the UCLA and Illinois football programs, who thought watching the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl would be a good idea?

I understand having a television on as background noise, emitting the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl as Easy Listening that drifts in and drifts out. It's understandable and defensible because we live in a country where anybody can watch two mediocre football teams play on ESPN in the privacy of their own home if they so choose. However, I will stick with background music and old movies over at least half of the college football bowl games.

Who's playing in the BCS National Championship Game, again? Oh yeah, Alabama and LSU; just wake me up Jan. 10 and tell me which SEC superpower won the game.

Watching bowl games was once an essential component of my life experience.

Of course, I grew up in a very small town (Arcadia) where we only had three stations until 1989 (unless you went out and bought a satellite dish) and sometimes, at our house on Goodlander Street, we only had two channels on the family set because our NBC affiliate (KSNF 16) required delicate moving and balancing of the antennae for proper viewing. On New Year's Day (the officially recognized holiday), we had no choice but to watch college football bowl games or nothing, which obviously presented a better choice for a kid than Labor Day weekend with its seemingly endless broadcast of Jerry Lewis and friends. I went out and played sports on Labor Day weekend.

However, my life changed when I received my own television set for Christmas 1988 and cable television came to Arcadia a few months later. I remember watching the 1989 Fiesta Bowl 'tween the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the West Virginia Mountaineers, still a few months before cable. At that point in my life, my cousin and I were big Notre Dame fans and we someday dreamed of becoming Fighting Irish players. Hey, we liked Rocket Ismail and Ricky Watters and Tony Rice and the immortal Michael Stonebreaker. I remember cheering on Notre Dame that day and watching them win a National Championship over Major Harris and the gang.

I remember when all the "important" bowls were played on a single day. Ah, when life was complex because we had to pick and choose which game to watch or do our best remote control juggling act between games, pushing down as hard as possible on that "Last" button to keep informed of the progress of at least two games. We had none of that "spread out the important bowl games" garbage.

I remember the excitement at the beginning of the day every January. I always skipped the Tournament of Roses Parade because I have never liked parades. I rarely watched the Cotton Bowl and I rarely watched any bowl games which involved UCLA, USC, Ohio State or Nebraska. I eventually grew tired of Florida, Florida State and Miami, especially Florida and Miami. I did get a great kick from watching Alabama stomp Miami and Heisman Trophy winner Gino Torretta into the ground 34-13 in 1993.

Watching Florida and Nebraska in the 1996 National Championship Game felt like a responsibility rather than anything enjoyable, so, at some point, I gave up watching most bowl games and stuck with highlight reels, especially since it seems like we’ve entered an endless loop of either Alabama, LSU or Florida winning a national title every year.

Of course, there's always been exceptions, like watching Vince Young and Texas knock off USC for a national title. One reason for wearing an Oregon State hat dates back to when the Beavers defeated No. 1 USC in 2008, so keep an intense bias against USC in mind.

Just as I remember the excitement at the beginning of New Year's Day bowl watching, I also remember the dread of going to bed that night knowing that school would begin the next day and it's a long time until Spring Break.

Now, I still dread commercial breaks (some things never change) and last year, as a new sports writer responsible for TV/Radio on the sports page, I did my best to never write sponsors like "R+L Carriers" in front of their bowl games because it felt like product placement. I mean, couldn't you live another minute without knowing the San Diego County Credit Union sponsors the Poinsettia Bowl?

This bowl season, I finally gave up and just dutifully typed in corporate partnerships because why not share "Beef O'Brady's," "AdvoCare V100," "Bridgepoint Education," "Franklin American Mortgage," "Taxslayer.com" and "Chick-fil-A." I no longer fight the power because "resistance is futile."

Let's hope someday that we'll get the 2000 Flushes Bowl, the J-E-L-L-O Bowl and the Hawaiian Punch Bowl. The Tupperware Bowl would just be too much.

Also futile would be the sports column in 2012 stumping for the demolition of the old corrupt bowl system and the establishment of a playoff system. We've been there, read that. Hell, even the overlords of the old corrupt bowl system, they've been there, read that a few times over.

Note: “Take the Sports Fans Bowling” badly recycles a song title (“Take the Skinheads Bowling”) from semi-legendary 1980s college rock band Camper Van Beethoven, whose songs include “The Day That Lassie Went to the Moon,” “ZZ Top Goes to Egypt” and “Eye of Fatima.”