Football for the Easily Distracted: Minor Bowls in Three Sentences or Less, Part I

Ready for bowl season? Join FanHouse as we preview each of the 34 bowls with a lot of analysis, a little irreverence, and, we promise, at least one joke about Karl Malden's nose. Your parents, or Joe Paterno, will explain it to you.

Below are the Week 1 bowl games. Click here for Week 2 and the non-BCS bowls of Week 3. Or click here for BCS bowls analysis.

As the radio and TV keep telling us, it's the most wonderful time of the year. For college football fans, this is most certainly true. We're only 10 days away from the start of the bowl season, and already, the BCS national championship has been analyzed to death. (Hey, did you realize Oklahoma scores a lot of points? Wow, Florida has a good quarterback. I think his name is Tom Turbo or something.)

Some games get substantially less attention than the big time, big money blockbusters, however, and there's a good reason for that. They're only meaningful to the teams involved and their fans. But that doesn't mean that we fans should pay them no attention. It just means we don't need to pay them much attention.

So we at FanHouse have decided to give you a brief summary of these lesser games. I know that calling the Motor City Bowl "lesser" might be controversial, at least to people from Detroit, or people from the planet Gazorpnitz. For the rest of us, we'll keep it short. We start with the games played before Dec. 30, and if you don't see a game previewed here, it'll get more attention from one of us later. Now, onward!

Yes, onward to the inaugural EagleBank Bowl (Wake Forest vs. Navy). This is not a real game; this is a bold yet cynical experiment to see if anybody who watches this game on TV will actually notice that ESPN is just replaying the game these two teams have already played.

Next up: the New Mexico Bowl (Colorado State vs. Fresno State). It's okay. I forgot there was a Colorado State too.

The third game on Pointless Bowl Saturday will be the St. Petersburg Bowl (Memphis vs. South Florida). They'll play this one in Tropicana Field, which should help the South Florida players forget that they didn't actually make a bowl "trip."

Dec. 21 brings us the New Orleans Bowl (Southern Miss vs. Troy), also known as the Sun Belt Conference's Milkbone of Mediocrity Mitigation. Traditionally this is the only bowl game to include a Sun Belt team, but this year, two Sun Belt teams actually made the postseason. Thus, Troy's reward for winning the conference this year is not just a bowl bid; it's also not having to go to the Motor City Bowl.

After a brief pause for some more interesting games, we come to the aforementioned What's Left Of The Motor City Bowl (Florida Atlantic vs. Central Michigan). Normally this is a chance for a MAC team to beat up on a thoroughly humiliated Big Ten squad. This year it's a chance to see a team that lost to Georgia by 39 points play a team that lost to Minnesota by 34 points.

The Meineke Car Care Bowl (West Virginia vs. North Carolina) is the only bowl game this season involving two teams which each beat Connecticut by at least 20 points. It's not every year you get to watch a bowl game like that, people.

Orlando hosts two bowl games every year, and no matter what, the Champs Sports Bowl (Wisconsin vs. Florida State) is absolutely one of them. Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema says Bobby Bowden reminds him of his college coach, Hayden Fry. He ought to; they're the same age.

As we creep towards New Year's Eve, we come to the Independence Bowl (Northern Illinois vs. Louisiana Tech). Since this game pits a 7-5 WAC team against a 6-6 MAC team, we can safely assume one of two things about the people who watch this game. They're either connected to one of the two universities, or they're sitting on the couch in their underwear eating instant mashed potato flakes straight from the box.

That brings us to the Papajohns.com Bowl (North Carolina State vs. Rutgers). Rutgers finished the season with a six-game winning streak; N.C. State finished with a four-game winning streak. Since college football is a game of momentum, I think it's clear that neither team can lose this game, so you'd better watch.

Lastly, we get to the Alamo Bowl (Missouri vs. Northwestern). Mizzou was ranked in the top 10 for a good chunk of the season, while Northwestern got passed up for a New Year's Day bowl in favor a team they beat decisively on the road. Since both these teams consider it a travesty that they have to be in this game, that ought to make for some really exciting football.

In Part 2 we'll look at the games taking place Dec. 30th or later. Don't worry, the games get better. Sort of.