Maybe 34 bowls was too many after all?

The more stories I read about this year's bowl national situation, the more things keep coming back to one trend. People are not buying tickets to these games at anything close to their normal pace. When UF is playing for the national title in Miami and prices are 400 bucks a month out from the matchup, that speaks volumes. Ohio State has opened bowl ticket sales to the general public, something which never happens up there. Maryland's denying they've only sold sixteen tickets to the Humanitarian Bowl, but acknowledge their total will likely wind up in the hundreds. Utah, with an undefeated season, has been unable to sell their full load of Sugar Bowl tickets. Obviously the economy is a huge factor here, but that can't explain all of it. The essentially meaningless quality of these games seems to be sinking in, and if that trend continues the BCS might have to reconsider its anti-playoff stance soonr than anyone could have imagined.

Another day, another lost Sooner for the BCS title game. This time it's defensive tackle DeMarcus Granger. He's been banged up for most of the season and his stats don't wow you, but this is a quality player in the Oklahoma interior rotation. It's far from a crippling blow, but it does take another bite out of them.

The BCS Championship Game will be avilable for viewing in 3-D. My question is why anyone would want to do that. It'll cost around twenty bucks, and there's no guaruntee the broadcast will work perfectly. The recent NFL test run went well in some places but was a technical nightmare in others. That was for a crappy Raiders-Chargers game though, so if someone wanted to try it as a novelty then what would the harm have been? This is a huge game if you care at all about college football - find a big HD screen somewhere and you should be good. Here's the website if you want to see if the 3-D presentation's available anywhere near you.

The Gene Chizik departure to Auburn from Iowa State didn't go over so well there, leading to two of his ex-players posting videos of themselves on Facebook lamenting his departure. Among the thoughtful expressions of regret from the student-athletes: "Rule one: Don’t f--- with a Florida n----. Rule two: Don’t lie to your team. Rule three: Respect rule two." Words to live by, no doubt. Technologies which allow Einsteins like this to put anything that pops into their heads out there for the whole world to see thirty seconds later have to be the worst thing that ever happened to college coaches and ADs.

A new study shows that talk radio has become the number one format in the US. This trend will continue to build for a long time to come. I work for a forty thousand watt FM sports station in market 89. There's not a chance in hell this station would have existed five years ago - sports was always put in the AM ghetto on crappy thousand watt stations like 1230. Music radio is being killed off by the Ipod and the internet, meaning talk programming is the only unique quality radio has to offer in the coming decade. Sooner or later someone in Gainesville will have the good sense to go to an all-sports format on FM. When they do, they'll make a lot of money.