How to Fix College Bowl Season

The Pitt Panthers, my favorite college team, is playing in the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria Compass Bowl in Birmingham, Alabama.  BBVA Compass (who the hell are they?) is a bank, centered in Bilbao, Spain, and now is spreading into the southern U.S., with USA headquarters in Alabama.  When I was a kid, I used to think these games meant something.  Sure, games like the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, or even ones like the Gator and Outback Bowls count.  But when a team starts off the year saying, "Yeah, we're the BBVA Compass Bowl champs!", it's kind of sad.

These bowl games are run by money -- lots of it.  However, there are way to many of them.  If a corporation can put up a certain amount of cash (the higher-caliber the bowl, the more money needed to sponsor it), the bowl goes on.  I'm guessing bowl games like the Compass Bowl and Beef o Brady's St. Petersburg Bowl don't need much cash for sponsorship.

So many of these games mean absolutely nothing, and their whacky sponsorships make it even worse.  How these companies choose these teams is a sham as well.  This is how the bowl scene used to look for the Big East Conference:

Orange Bowl: champ
Gator: Big East #2
Meineke  Car Care Bowl: Big East #3

That #2 and #3 doesn't mean the second and third-place teams in the conference; it means that the Gator Bowl gets second choice of Big East teams, and the Meineke Bowl the #3 choice.  That means that a team like UCONN, who doesn't have a large football fanbase, could finish as #2 in the conference, but be relegated to the Meineke Car Care Bowl (lolololol) because another team in the conference (like WVU) can sell more tickets to the Gator Bowl.  Though it makes sense, it's unfair.  Just eliminate the Meineke bowl and force the Gator Bowl to take the smaller team.

Here's how to fix it (maybe):

There are different tiers of bowl games.  The top tier looks like this:

BCS Championship
Rose Bowl
Sugar Bowl
Orange Bowl
Fiesta Bowl

Second Tier (New Year's Day games, but not BCS games):


Cotton Bowl
Gator Bowl
Capital One Bowl (formerly the Citrus and Tangerine bowl)
Outback Bowl

Third Tier (historic, long-running bowl games):


Sun Bowl
Liberty Bowl
Independence Bowl
Alamo Bowl

Beyond that, ya got me.  I don't know any other bowls that belong.  At this rate, a team that is 6-5 is "bowl eligible."  Why reward a team for being average?  What each tier would do is choose teams on a rotating basis.  The BCS National Championship Game is reserved for the #1 and 2 teams, so it takes them out of the mix.  The rest of the top-10 teams would be chosen by the bowls in the top-tier.  Then, the second tier gets their choice, and then the third-tier.  While this doesn't "fix" the problem, I think it's somewhat of a better solution than what's going on now.  But let's be honest, what we have won't change -- I can just make my list and wonder.