THE FIRST ANNUAL BOWL BOWL: A Redundant Athletic Gathering

by Zach Crantz, zcrantz@rivalfish.com

No one will be wearing shoes at this particularly mellow NCAA football game. This is because those attending will be high and they’ll feel just too environmentally conscious. The helpless grass will seem just too fragile for those kinds of 'soles.' Everyone invited to this game will be smoking lots of pot and conversing about the corrupt political machine that is the BCS.

There’s an old joke which goes as follows:
Q: What is the one thing that pot and Michigan football have in common?
A: They both get smoked in 'bowls.'

Yes, I agree, there are some damned clever little potheads out there. Fortunately, this joke has lost its appropriateness this year because Michigan isn’t even getting packed into the right bowl. This January they will not get smoked at all; instead, Michigan will do the smoking. Even I'm sick of hearing myself talk about the BCS; so, I decided to write about it one last time instead. Besides, there is huge news to relay along to the wide-eyed/bushy-tailed Rivalfish community (aka all of our writers’ collective group of friends, 24 random regulars, and the occasional passerby).

It has just been reported that the Michigan Wolverines have opted to send their B-squad to the Rose Bowl this year and that they are sending Henne, Hart, Manningham et al to the Bowl Bowl instead. When I asked coach Carr why he was doing this he just looked at me through squinted eyelids and said, in a muffled voice that made me think he was having trouble breathing, “That’s a very good question; a great question.” Then he exhaled a giant cloud of purplish smoke and walked away. Weird. It was hard to find other appropriate individuals --with relevant opinions-- to comment but, like those astute Houdini sand fleas at the Carolina seashore, I kept on digging. With the help of some of my contacts I was able to get a hold of Fidel Castro and Osama Bin Laden to give their two cents (two cents which they, of course, robbed from their oppressed people). It turns out they both watch college football (apparently Comcast really is Com-f*cking-castic), and they both agree that their cousin, Jim Tressel, should have his Buckeyes follow suit and do the same B-squad swap for the BCS National Championship game by sending his real men to the Bowl Bowl.

Fidel claims he has known "that little Tressel bastard" since he wore a miniature sweater vest upside down as a diaper. He says that anything more forceful than a mere explicit suggestion of this B-squad swap would, and I quote, “Make the Cuban Missile Crisis look like a Sunday afternoon in a Gainesville nursing home.” I have absolutely no f*cking clue what Mr. Castro meant by this but it seemed important so I kept it in this report. As it turns out, with the right amount of peer pressure from these two dictators, Tressel was strong-armed into sending his best boys to the Bowl Bowl as well.

Apparently, players at this alternative National Championship game will, instead of playing against each other, play with each other toward a common goal: make an absolute mockery of the game. Quarterbacks will follow in the BCS’s footsteps by tossing their once-opponents some bones. Instead of trying to avoid throwing interceptions, it will be the QB’s primary objective to give them away as if he is a celebrity martyr passing out condoms at an AIDs Shelter. Wide receivers will play more like deranged free safeties that immediately hand the ball off to their opposition and vice versa (imagine the biggest, most confusing game of 500 ever actualized). Players will drench the other team’s coach in Gatorade at the end of the game and fans will be too high to know what the hell is going on. It is really is going to be a sight to see.

Due to the recent announcement of this year’s Bowl Bowl, in addition to the other sixteen thousand bowl games (plus or minus a cherry), gambling point spreads are now about as unimportant as a Pamela Anderson Playboy spread. Things have gotten so skewed this year that sports bookies are only taking “gentlemen bets;” bets in which no money actually changes hands and instead the winners get to kick the losers in the nuts in the presence of legendary boxing referee Mills Lane. Seriously, the fact that Vegas had a 3 pt. spread for a Mich. v. OSU rematch and a whopping 8 ½ pt. spread for FL v. OSU really says it all. In Las Vegas, they actually pay these genius statisticians-turned-“researchers” to not have families just to make sure these spreads are as creepy-sixth-sense-esque as is humanly possible. So, the outcome of the Rose Bowl and the BCS National Championship game have already been written by the football gods. Because of this, I strongly encourage you to do some chores for the nice elderly lady down the street who has a prescription to some medicinal marijuana, kick back, take some rips from a bong, and watch the Bowl Bowl this year in lieu of the already written “top-notch” bowl games.

My honest predictions for the actual games: Michigan 44, USC 20; OSU 27, Florida 10 (if I’m completely wrong then I’ll claim to have been high when I wrote this). Also, keep in mind that these predictions are made assuming A-Teams are actually playing A-Teams. Finally and fittingly, in the words of the A-Team alpha male, a man who goes by the name of Mr. T: “I pity the da BCS.” Cheers my friends. Go Blue!!! And I never thought I’d say this, but Go Bucks!!!???