The Great College Football Scam: Why Dec. 27 is a Bonanza of ‘Woes’
So here we are again, staring down the barrel of another college football Saturday—specifically, December 27th, a day the establishment media wants you to believe is a glorious ‘bonanza’ of football. They say we’re getting eight games, a feast for the eyes, a celebration of the sport from morning until night. But if you actually pay attention, you see that it’s less a bonanza and more a high-stakes, corporate-fueled cash grab that uses our love for the game as bait, while serving up a product that feels increasingly hollow and meaningless. We’re told to get excited about the ‘eight college football bowls on Dec. 27,’ but what exactly are we celebrating? The ‘ebbs and woes’ of this season are not just random chance; they are direct symptoms of a diseased system.
The computer models—all those algorithms and probabilities from sites like SportsLine—are just the latest layer of smoke and mirrors designed to make you believe that these exhibition games actually have some sort of inherent meaning or competitive value beyond moving money through betting houses. We’re fed these ‘best bets’ and ‘model picks,’ like Georgia Tech against Missouri, and asked to analyze them as if the players involved care as much about the outcome as the spreadsheet does. But let’s be real: these games are essentially glorified scrimmages where a significant portion of the talent has already checked out. It’s all just data for the house.
The Illusion of Competition: A Timeline of Deception
Let’s go back for a minute to the origin story. The college football bowl system started with a simple idea: a postseason exhibition game, like the Rose Bowl, to showcase regional champions and reward successful seasons. It was a beautiful thing. A genuine reward for hard work. But like almost everything else in modern American culture, it metastasized into a monster. It started with four, then eight, then fifteen, and now we’re staring at over 40 bowl games, turning a genuine honor into a participation trophy for every team with a winning record that manages to scrape by a few close games against FCS opponents. The criteria for entry have been so diluted that a 6-6 team gets to ‘celebrate’ its mediocre season in front of sparse crowds in exotic locations like Shreveport or Phoenix, where the main attraction isn’t the game itself but the free steak dinner for the coaches and administrators.
The ‘ebbs and woes’ we hear about in the headlines? That’s just the establishment’s nice way of describing player opt-outs. The real story here is that the players themselves are waking up. Why should a potential first-round NFL draft pick risk injury in a meaningless game for a corporate sponsor’s trophy? Why should a player who’s entering the transfer portal give their all for a school they’re leaving next week? The players, in a beautiful act of defiance against a predatory system, are choosing themselves. They are prioritizing their future careers and personal safety over the financial interests of the NCAA and the bowls, who historically haven’t paid them a dime beyond a ‘scholarship’ that barely covers living expenses while generating billions in revenue.
NIL and the Transfer Portal: The Revolution
The rise of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) legislation combined with the transfer portal has completely broken the old power structure, and the bowls are the first to show the cracks. The NCAA, in its infinite wisdom, fought tooth and nail against paying players for decades, clinging to the antiquated concept of ‘amateurism.’ Now that players finally have some control over their financial destiny, they’re using it to protect themselves. The bowls are suffering because they are a non-essential part of the new system. The only real competitive games are the College Football Playoff semifinals and finals. Everything else is just fluff designed to sell sponsorships and generate gambling revenue. The ‘computer model picks’ are just noise in this new reality, where the only thing that matters is how much a player values their future earnings versus a plastic trophy.
We hear the pundits complain constantly: ‘It’s ruining tradition! It’s making the games unwatchable!’ But what tradition are they protecting? The tradition of exploitation? The tradition of administrators getting rich while players are forced to risk their bodies for free? No, this is a positive disruption. This is the free market correcting itself, even if it makes the product on December 27th look like a high school jamboree.
The Future of the System: More Expansion, More Irrelevance
What’s the answer to this problem for the establishment? Expansion, of course. The College Football Playoff expanded to 12 teams. The rationale? More excitement, more opportunities for different schools to compete for a title. The reality? More money for the top conferences (SEC and Big Ten) and an even wider gap between the elite and everyone else. The new system creates a two-tiered universe. On one side, you have the 12 teams fighting for the national championship; on the other side, you have everyone else playing in what are essentially pre-season exhibitions for bragging rights. The new 12-team playoff structure makes the other 30+ bowls even more irrelevant than they were before. They become the ‘kiddie table’ of college football, a consolation prize where no one actually wants to be. So when you see those computer models predict picks for games on December 27th, remember that you are essentially participating in a betting-industry charade. Are we really going to pretend that the winner of the Whatever-Sponsored-Bowl game is anything other than a footnote in a season defined by a completely different championship structure?
The Populist Fight isn’t just about politics; it’s about sports too. It’s about recognizing when we are being manipulated by corporate interests and media narratives. The eight games on December 27th aren’t a celebration; they are a symptom of a system that has lost its way, prioritizing profit over player welfare and genuine competition. It’s time for fans to recognize the smoke and mirrors for what they are and demand something better. Stop buying into the hype for games that even the players don’t care about.
