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MOAR BOWLS: NCAA could add four more bowl games to jammed schedule

Andrew Weber-USA TODAY Sports

I don't comment too much on news that only affects the landscape of college sports if there's no direct tie to Pitt. But talk of more bowl expansion caught my eye this past week.

ICYMI, college football could add another four bowl games to the 2015 slate. That would give us a total of 43 games and three of the four would go to the AAC, virtually sending all of their bowl-eligible teams ... well, somewhere. As ESPN points out, 66% of all college football teams would play in bowl games under the proposal.

The locations applying for the games are all warm-weather climates in Tucson, Austin, Little Rock, and Orlando.

Adding more games, of course, is nothing new. The astonishing to me is how quickly games are being added. If these four applications go through, that would make nine new bowls in the past two years alone since five were added last season. In all, that's a 21% increase in just two years ... which is staggering given the number of bowl games there already were.

Not only would the nine in two years easily be the biggest expansion, according to ACCFootballRx, there's never even been any expansion in back to back years.

Look, let me be clear about this. There's no sense in being upset about this in any way if you're of the belief that there are too many bowl games. Frankly, that ship of making the bowls an exclusive thing sailed a long time ago. What I'm surprised about, however, is the absolute mass expansion in such short order since that's a complete 180 from how these things have been done in the past.

There's already a large amount of overkill when it comes to the bowl games, but this kind of expansion in only two years seems beyond ridiculous. The driving factor is clearly money here, but even in that context, the rush to create as many bowl games as possible still looks kind of nuts, right?

I mean, with this kind of expansion, how far are we from having sub .500 teams being able to play in bowl games? I get the point (which is made in the ESPN link, by the way) of every 6-6 team finding a home, but in reality, aren't we okay if every single .500 team doesn't find its way to a bowl?

I guess not.

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