Tough to be bowled over by New Year’s Day matchups

I’d never taken a long walk on New Year’s Day. Never been bargain hunting on New Year’s Day, never been to a beach on New Year’s Day.

I’ve never been to church, never been to a restaurant, never been to a friend’s house. Never, not once in 39 years of single life, did I ever have a date on New Year’s Day. Never, not once in 11 years of married life, have I ever taken my wife to dinner on New Year’s Day.

One thing and only one thing has mattered for every single New Year’s Day of my entire life: bowl games. Didn’t matter who was playing; I watched bowl games. Virtually everybody I knew has watched bowl games. Either I watched on TV or covered them for this newspaper for a total of, oh, 42, 43 years, something like that.

Until this year.

On New Year’s Day 2009, after watching the first two periods of the NHL’s Winter Classic outdoors in Chicago’s Wrigley Field, I announced that I was leaving the house to take a drive. My wife, astounded, said, “You’ve never left the house on New Year’s Day in the whole time I’ve known you. Is there something wrong with you?”

Well, yeah, something was seriously wrong. The bowl games, for the first time in my life, didn’t matter. The people who run college football had succeeded, finally, in killing New Year’s Day. Instead of college playoff games commanding our attention, we were left with a bunch of BCS exhibitions that meant absolutely nothing. I didn’t know what games were being played at what times, nor in several cases, what day. Not until I sat down and started typing these words did I know that the Fiesta Bowl, played right here in Arizona where I’m spending the first week of this New Year, won’t be played until Monday, Jan. 5. I’m now guessing -- seriously, this is a total guess -- the Sugar Bowl will be played Friday night. The Cotton Bowl, I’m told, has been moved out of the early New Year’s Day slot to the day after.

Why? The Cotton Bowl hasn’t been a game of consequence for years.

The Orange Bowl, the only game played in prime time on New Year’s night, featured two teams not ranked in the Top 10. The Rose Bowl, as we all suspected going in, was a total non-contest. It’s fine for Penn State to play USC; it just should have been a 1 vs. 8 quarterfinal game in the national college football playoff. As is, the Granddaddy of ‘em all amounted to an exhibition, too. I watched 20 minutes, max.

Seems the folks entrusted to oversee college football have so worried themselves into a tizzy over the sacredness of the regular season they’ve now let the postseason go straight to Hades.

And with no NFL games, with no NBA games, New Years’ Day as a sporting tradition has gone south as well. The Orange Bowl couldn’t hold me for 10 minutes.

Because there’s no playoff and only a BCS Championship game on Jan. 8, the implicit message is that nothing leading up to that matters, not even New Years’ Day games. We’re told by the BCS that Oklahoma and Florida are the two best teams in the country. So, why watch USC if they have no chance? Why watch Alabama play Utah (another perfect No. 1 vs. No. 8 playoff matchup) if the Tide has no chance to finish No. 1?

New Year’s Day 2009 was such an enormous disappointment that I’m now hoping President-elect Barack Obama wasn’t teasing when he said he might just throw his weight around to pressure the powers-that-be into staging a playoff.

What New Year’s Day should have had was either the four quarterfinal games (Oklahoma-Penn State, Florida-Texas Tech, Texas-Utah, Alabama-USC). You don’t think ‘Bama vs. USC in single elimination would have been riveting, must-see TV on New Year’s Day? You’d plan your day around that game.