By J. Frank Parnell
I haven’t taken a poll but I’d bet most football fans would agree that bowl games are out of control. I think there are 35 this year, which is at least a dozen too many.
The problem with this many games is a few probably won’t be worth watching. Are you fired up about the Heart of Texas Bowl? Do you know who plays in the Heart of Texas Bowl? The University of Nevada at Las Vegas vs. North Texas State University. If there’s a “Twilight Zone” on at 11 a.m., Jan. 1, I’ll probably watch it.
I could go on: Arizona vs. Boston College in Shreveport. You can bet that’s a cheap ticket at game time. Middle Tennessee vs. Navy. I simply don’t care.
Here’s an idea to make the bowl season more entertaining and certainly more challenging. I had this thought while working on a short article about how football players handle mouthpieces. They’re disgusting safety devices but nobody seems to notice the bizarre treatment they get on the field.
I wrote and thought and watched mouthpieces during games but the piece wasn’t going anywhere. I thought it was kind of clever but it didn’t have a point. Now it does.
Like Jeff Lebowski, I was looking at it all wrong until I started seeing mouthpieces as a drinking game.
Here’s how it works, or here’s how it can work. Make up your own rules. Let’s say four or five people are watching a game. Each person chooses a player, maybe the quarterbacks, a star receiver and a couple of running backs. Every time there’s a shot on TV of your QB with his mouthpiece in his hand, you drink. Maybe he wedges it in his facemask between plays. Drink again. Perhaps he parks it behind his ear (which seems to be more common among defensive players). You drink again. What if he drops it? You get the idea.
Part of the fun of the game is setting the rules. Maybe bowl enthusiasts don’t pick players. Maybe everybody drinks when any player is seen with a mouthpiece in his hand or he’s caught on camera plucking it from a vent in his helmet.
Most of the bowl games this season won’t need this extra flair to make them fun to watch. But it’s worth a thought for the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl or the Little Caesars Bowl.
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