Notre Shame

The Golden Domers put forth another disgraceful display. Only this time, it came off the field.

Notre Dame announced yesterday that its football team will opt not to play in a bowl game, even though the team is "bowl eligible" with its pitiful 6-6 record (The criteria for being bowl eligible is the subject for another rip another time, but for now, I'll stick with skewering the Flighting Irish). Notre Dame hadn't locked into a specific game yet, but you can be sure they would have gotten into a better one than they deserved based on their gigantic fan base.

Seriously, who does Notre Dame think it is? The team has been mediocre for nearly two decades but yet it seemingly considers itself too good to show its face in the GMAC Bowl?

I guess playing in the postseason is old hat for this team after that monumental victory over Hawaii in last year's, you guessed it, Hawaii Bowl. Nevermind the fact that the Irish had lost nine straight bowl games before that, an incredibly anemic span stretching all the way back to 1995.

In other words, get over yourself Notre Dame! You're not a big deal anymore!

What makes this story even more distasteful is the fact that the players themselves had a say in this. This pervasive sense of unwarranted entitlement must have spread all the way down as the team took a vote in the past week.

Don't you have to question the mindset of a squad of college-aged kids that wouldn't want to take a group trip somewhere, get a lot of free stuff and get cheered on by screaming coeds to go play a football game on national TV? Man, am I thankful I don't have to do that.

Maybe Charlie Weis wasn't such a bad coach after all. Maybe his team was just a bunch of spoiled brats.

Well, check that. It was obviously a combination of those factors and others since Weis clearly stinks when running the show. He knows how to put up points (It helps to have Jimmy Clausen and Golden Tate -- best name in sports?), but when it comes to everything else, he is as lost as they come.

I would say I wish I could watch the fat fraud lose one more time, but he's already gone anyway. Hopefully, the football program will ditch its snotty attitude next.

Ugly Ending In Sight

All those times the NCAA has avoided potential problems with its archaic way of setting a national champion in football have apparently added up to one colossal debacle. Enter 2009: The Year Of The Disaster.

At this very moment there are six (six!!!) teams that are still undefeated as we approach the final stretch of the regular season. Last time I checked, in a bowl game only two can play each other at one time.

Look, we've heard the argument for a playoff for years, but it's not an argument anymore. It's simply a statement of logic.

Virtually every other sport has some kind of season-ending tournament to crown a champion and why college football, one of this country's top draws for more than a century, still doesn't is absolutely ridiculous.

We've heard the laughable excuses of the wear and tear of a longer season and the claim the students would miss too much class time if they had to play a few extra games (I guess they haven't heard of shortening the regular season to compensate). Yet somehow, March Madness for college basketball is so long that it lasts into April.

Obviously, the reason for the way things are all revolves around the big bucks that the bowl games pull in, but it's not like a playoff system wouldn't generate any money (See the aforementioned college basketball). I don't have any projected numbers, but something tells me there would be just a little interest generated by a tournament on top of the endless wave of mainly meaningless bowl games.

Alabama and Florida will get their shot to earn their way into the title game when they square off in the SEC Championship, but for the rest of these teams, their fates rely on a bunch of computer nerds. The BCS is a much better system than what was in place before when undefeated teams didn't necessarily play each other due to conference obligations, but it's true acronym should be "Belies Common Sense."

Boise State's epic win over Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl proved teams from non BCS conferences can play with the big boys. Utah's thrashing of Alabama in last year's Sugar Bowl proved they can contend for a national championship.

Utah didn't get its chance to play for a title despite finishing the season as the country's only undefeated team. How many teams will suffer the same injustice this year?