FanNation

...when you're watching hot guys play football. There's only one game left until next year, but it doesn't seem so long ago that I was counting down the days until the start of the season. After all the crazyness of the past few months, I'm already excited to see if the 2008 season can match up.

With only the championship game remaining, I have to say bowl week really didn't match up to the regular season. The only game I watched all the way through was, of course, the Rose Bowl - no way was I going to miss a second of my USC Trojans trouncing on Illinois, even though they still had far too many penalties for my liking. Joe McKnight's butter-fingers have apparently been remedied and he redeemed himself in my eyes with really sharp, heads-up play and I can't wait to see how he does next year.

The other bowl games were kind of "eh," even though some have brought almost as many surprises as the regular season games. The only outcome I truly expected was Georgia over Hawaii in the Sugar Bowl. I was really hoping Hawaii would win to continue its streak and prove wrong everyone who said they couldn't hang with the big Dawgs. I wasn't expecting it, but I was hoping. Oh well.

I was hoping against expectations that Kansas would win the Orange Bowl and was surprised they actually did. VT had me fooled into thinking they were a much stronger team, and Kansas seemed a little too soft. Given the unpredictability that has characterized this season, I should've known a little better than to think that just because a relatively-untested Hawaii got stomped on in its biggest game, a largely-untested Kansas would have the same fate.  

The team I expected to win - Oklahoma - surprised me by coming up short. Twenty points short, in fact. I thought it would be a close game, but I also thought they were better than losing 48-28 to the Mountaineers. Maybe it was the flashbacks to last year's Fiesta Bowl but the Sooners looked fuzzy and unfocused, and Sam Bradford picked a pretty awful time to start playing like a redshirt freshman rather than the guy with the nation's highest QB rating. As much as I didn't want a WVU win, in the wake of losing Rich Rodriguez to Michigan, I say good for them. The best thing the team could do for its still-reeling community is win without Rich Rod, and they did. (Speaking of Michigan, they gave Lloyd Carr a pretty darn good send-off as Tim Tebow got hit by the Heisman curse and the Gators couldn't continue Urban Meyer's bowl winning streak.)

So is all this uncertainty good or bad for the sport? It makes doling out bowl invitations tricky; who truly deserved to go to the BCS Championship game, or any of the BCS bowls, was up in the air the entire season, and now that nearly all the games are over, it's no clearer. It's fabulous that some under-the-radar teams are competing with the perennial powerhouses, but it's definitely given the analysts some ammo in favor of a playoff because it makes the bowl selection process look completely arbitrary. Nearly everyone had a different idea about which teams rightfully belonged in which bowls, and there are quite a few people out there who feel Ohio State - LSU shouldn't be the title game. When the case for this particular matchup is so shaky, it makes the system look like a farce. At this point, it seems like the title game, and the other bowls, don't mean anything. Is it any wonder bowl season isn't so captivating?