New Year's Void

Happy New Year 2011! New Year's is kind of a weird holiday, it's mostly about staying up late, watching parades, watching football games, and eating... again...

Except this year, I noticed the football part appears to be a little thin.

One of the things I always remembered about New Year's Day from my youth was watching a flurry of college games. There were a dozen games on half a dozen channels, offering plenty to choose from. You watched pieces of a bunch of games during the first half of the day before settling in for the bigger games at night. It was a buffet of college football games.

Today — the networks offer the Rose Parade, ABC has one college bowl game (featuring Florida and Penn State) at 10 a.m. then it's reruns of Access Hollywood, movies, and mediocre TV shows. Happy New Year!

ESPN, meanwhile, has a steady stream of games all day long, including the Rose Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl. But why are those games relegated to cable? It's all part of the growing disconnect between history and the way that bowl season runs now.

Say you wanted to watch your favorite team, like Boise State, in a bowl game. Hope you tuned in on December 22. That's right, three days before Christmas a pair of top 25 teams — Boise State and Utah — clashed in a bowl game. Bowl season now kicks off around December 19 and runs until the National Championship Game — on January 10, 2011. That's right, the National Title game won't be until a week from Monday....

What's even crazier is the fact that the regular season in college football ends somewhere between Thanksgiving weekend and the first weekend in December. That's quite a layoff for teams that have to wait until the second week of the new year to play their bowl game.

New Year's Day used to be reserved for College Football, and while games are still played, it's not quite what it used to be. And, no, an outdoor hockey game doesn't fill the void...

Though I doubt it's going to change any time soon, it would be nice if the NCAA could manage to relocate the bowl games back to New Year's Day and if some of the networks might get back into the act of showing them. We can save Cops and Access Hollywood for another day...

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