The regular college football season is coming to a close and fans’ thoughts turn to whether their favorite team will be going to a post-season bowl.

The fever has gotten so great that the online sports publications are stepping up their efforts to pick the match-ups for the annual “second season.” I saw an article in the ESPN college football website listing the combatants for each bowl “if the bowl were played today.” There’s only one problem with the article. The bowls won’t be played for about a month, and with two games remaining in the season and the conference championship games coming soon after, a lot can happen that can turn the bowl selections and the pecking order for championship playoffs could be altered, throwing everything into the trash.

There are 39 bowl games, not counting the College Football Playoff. And to think it all began with one — the Rose Bowl. Then came the Sun Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl and the Gator Bowl. In those ancient years before cable TV and the satellites, that was the post-season TV fare for college football fans, and all were played on New Years Day. The three networks would announce the bowls they were going to broadcast, and folks adjusted their schedules accordingly. One thing was always certain, the Rose Bowl would be at 3 p.m. New Year’s Day on NBC.

But those six initial bowls (the Sun, Sugar and Orange bowls are the second oldest bowls, in case you’re interested) soon begot other bowls, whose offspring became too numerous to recall, and the bowl season came earlier and earlier.

And there were the strange names as companies began sponsorships and having the instant “classic” named after them. And there were the unlikeliest locations.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been told that bowls were a reward to teams for having good, winning seasons; it was the opportunity for a team to travel to Florida or New Orleans or California for some fun and football. But it’s hard to figure the reward of playing in a bowl game in Boise, Idaho, in late December, or even Fort Worth or New York City, where the games are played in open stadiums. It’s not so bad for the teams playing in domes as in Atlanta, Dallas or Houston.

And what happened to rewards for a successful season. Now, if a team has a 6-6 record, they’re eligible; that sounds like getting a participation trophy for sitting the bench during the season.

As much as I love college football (and I will watch a lot of bowl games), I think the bowl thing has gone overboard, and they need to cut them back. It’s getting out of hand, and in some ways, I think has diluted the quality of competition playing in the games.

I’d like, in some ways, to go back to the old days, when the bowls were few and the games much more interesting. 

John Surratt is a staff writer at The Vicksburg Post. You may reach him at john.surratt@vicksburgpost.com.