This blog is now about fraudulent bowl games

Yes, Ohio State came lumbering into Evanston and chortled ho ho ho and knocked everyone around for awhile and yes Northwestern is 1-5 and not moving the ball well and no one on TV wants to talk about their Yardage in polite company.
 
I only wish my DVR had an option to not only delete a game 
but produce a physical copy and bury in the giant pit that they 
supposedly buried all of the E.T. Atari cartridges in

There is nothing to learn or think about from that debacle.  Ohio State fans got the bloodletting they feel entitled to, Northwestern thrilled the crowd with a return to Classic Northwestern Football, and Pat Fitzgerald spent the majority of the game stunned into a slack-jawed reverie.  

For Northwestern's struggling offense, the task does not get any easier against a ferocious Iowa defense.  Iowa, though, as been only slightly less comical on offense than the Wildcats lately.  It is Northwestern's homecoming game and the stands will be as black and yellow as a yellowjacket.  Pat Fitzgerald seems to be falling into the worst season of his career.  There's not a lot of empirical evidence that the Wildcats can pull this off other than the inexplicably deranged psychological hold that Northwestern has over Iowa.

You can consult dozens of football experts, grizzled men with combover ponytails recorded for documentaries in front of bookshelves bulging with Joe Namath autobiographies and they will all unanimously agree that Northwestern consistently beating Iowa in increasingly ridiculous Rube Goldberg overtimes is one of the funniest things to happen in college football in recent memory. 
 
I wrote this joke before looking anything up just assuming 
that any Broadway Joe autobiography would have at least 
one profoundly risible feature-- you be the judge

Very few people know about it because even the most degenerate college football fans refuse to handle a Northwestern-Iowa game without the heavy smocks and tongs used to manipulate molten steel, but watching Iowa lose to a team that they probably should beat repeatedly because they fumble at the last second or because the quarterback falls down in overtime or because the referee makes a questionable call and then three guys get ejected for objecting like they are lawyers in a John Grisham adaptation is incredible.  It has happened frequently enough that both fanbases halfway expect a Northwestern team that cannot get a first down without notarized permission from at least three Governing Bodies to win just based on either faith in the occult or doom-mongering.  In a topsy-turvy world, Northwestern's half-assed victories over the Hawkeyes in the worst football game  a human being can subject themself to is one of the few things we can count on.

BOWL FRAUD

Bowls are largely a pointless scam-- they exist literally as content for ESPN the same way that Netflix buys some forgotten British shows called "The Mr Halcontern Charlton-Swedish Spooky Castle Mysteries" or "Oi the Fuck You Lookin' At with Oliver Hardman" and are left entirely in the hands of local Bowl Committees that exist as standard grasping, two-bit, suspender-thumbed, money skimming graft operations.  As long as ESPN has something to put on television at 4PM for the benefit of people desperate for anything to distract from talking to their in-laws or volatile cable television uncles, no one in charge of anything seems to give a shit about the mustache and tophat guys stuffing their pockets.  It's a lawless wilderness among vultures, although with a sort of old fashioned shamelessness that is almost charming.  That is why I am not at all surprised but completely elated by the Bullshit Bowl Sponsor.

Bowl sponsorships have become their own genre of joke.  There is no company or other sort of concern in America too ludicrous and stupid to sponsor a bowl game; it seems in recent years that bowl games have been purposefully seeking to sell their naming rights to only the silliest fly-by-nite operations.  Entire swaths of American consumer industries can probably be written from bowl sponsors alone-- they can be read like tree rings to pinpoint the exact moment of some particularly dumb trend that would be wiped off the face of the Earth and forgotten within two years. 
 
The St. Petersburg Bowl was a supernatural lightning rod for the dumbest 
bowl sponsors in the known universe

The New Mexico Bowl lost its bowl sponsor after local reporting revealed that the company sponsoring the bowl game didn't exist.  DreamHouse productions, the sponsor and a supposed production company, does not exist.  One reporter for Enchantment Sports found numerous people willing to go on record and describe the DreamHouse CEO as a conman claiming to be an actor, a boxer, a motivational speaker, and person who constantly photoshops himself into fake movie posters and at least one ad where he threatens to "take on" the Harlem Globetrotters.  

This is far more embarrassing for the New Mexico Bowl and ESPN than anyone else.  The alleged scammer is the type of person who will always exist.  In an earlier age, this type of guy would have to have a wagon and a tophat and fraudulently claim to be a colonel.  Somehow this person managed to purchase bowl naming rights without anyone checking to see if DreamHouse existed, if it did anything, if the executive had not been dogged by allegations of being a Cohen Brothers character from one of the dozens of people who are insanely angry with him, and if the DreamHouse company could pay actual American currency for naming rights.  Instead what appeared to happen is that everyone involved refused to countenance that anything was wrong with the sort of standoffish corporate pugilism until the dam broke and the entire thing was far too embarrassing for everyone involved.  "The company was announced in 2018 and was set to have its grand opening this past spring, according to its website," announced a website called bizjournals, an ominous note in an otherwise credulous press release.


This whole debacle is pretty funny but also personally devastating for me.  For many years I have offered various bowls the opportunity to partner with me to present the Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat dot blogpspot dot com Bowl, but none have listened because I have made my proposal by dot @ing them on twitter and because I have admittedly made an aggressive opening bid of $40.00.  Little did I know that all I had to do was claim I had a 25,000 square foot facility, one that can be used for the purposes of Blogging, and photoshop my face into a picture of Harlem Globtetrotters in order to be in business.  

The incredible thing about bowl games is not that the entire enterprise is riddled with corruption and money skimming, it is that it is such a transparent con that no one is even bother of doing the bare minimum to bother trying to make sure things appear on the up and up.  The bowl system is endemic of the type of lazy, denuded corruption that exists now by building something designed to make money through some passive way like TV ratings and putting some doofy company's name on a stupid football game that almost no one would go out of the way to watch and then letting the machine run and print money for a bunch of executives and dignitaries who do nothing but send out barely proofread press releases about how Being Excited To Partner With This Brand; the only person who seems to have broken the slightest amount of sweat is the guy who had to make a fake website for his fake company. Bowl games are just another weird media property that are part of an unaccountable and inexplicable flow of money despite no one asking for them or wanting them.

I will personally be devastated if Northwestern does not qualify for a bowl game this year.