So many bowl games (that's not a complaint)

My wife is complaining that I've been watching football every day lately. I'll admit, I've watched so many bowl games that they have all begun to run together. Not only did I watch the one I was actually interested in, the one involving my alma mater, I watched others as well, those involving teams I had not followed through the season and, in many cases, I had not seen play a game all year.

I'm a casual fan, not a fanatic. I don't watch game after game every weekend. I almost never watch Sports Center. I'm even less interested in navel-gazing about sports than I am interested in navel-gazing about politics.

But there are so many bowl games, and so many of them are good games involving excellent teams. Boise State's game (forgive me for not remembering whom they were playing or what was the name of the bowl) was a case in point. Boise has had an innovative and powerful offense. And I had some interest in Notre Dame's bowl game against Hawaii; I was interested in seeing whether Notre Dame would lose yet another bowl game. Last night's game, Alabama vs. Utah in the Sugar Bowl, promised to be a blowout. Alabama had been ranked No. 1 for most of the season. Utah, I thought, would stand little chance. But I turned on the TV soon enough to see Utah score three touchdowns in the first half of the first quarter! I couldn't stay up to see the end of the game, to see whether Alabama's comeback would be successful, but I watched long enough to see some extraordinary football performances. When I got up this morning, I went to the computer to check the score and see that Utah had held on, convincingly, making Utah the only Division I team with a perfect record and, thereby, giving the Utes a claim to a national championship.

The problem is, there is no real national championship for Division I (or Bowl Championship Series) teams. Florida and Oklahoma will play in the National Championship bowl, but disputes will linger, no matter how the game comes out. Both teams have lost games, giving their conquerors a claim to a national championship as well. The only solution is a true playoff system for Division I teams. Commentators on one of the bowl games I watched (forgive me, they all run together) had a good proposal: Play the four big, traditional bowls (Rose, Sugar, Cotton and Orange) on New Year's Day. Then take the two highest-ranked, most convincing victors in those games and pit them against each other a week later in a national championship game. It's not a perfect system, but it's better than the current, much-criticized methodology.

But my wife won't like it. It will still mean a lot of good games on the TV, and I'll find a large number of them interesting enough to watch, at least for a while.