Look Out for Pirates

Which ACC Bowl game should East Carolina go to? Should a 13-0 record put them in the Orange Bowl? Can they do a worse than the ACC teams in recent memory? Or let’s imagine that ECU goes 11-2 losing in the C-USA Championship game, but winning their three games against Virginia Tech, Virginia, and NC State. Is it fair that the Pirates will go to the GMAC Bowl while a lesser team from the Atlantic Coast Conference goes to the Chick-fil-A, Gator, or Champ Bowl by virtue of the conference membership?

Much has been made of the “BCS Busters” where a deserving team from a lesser non-BCS conference gets the dream of a life time and is allowed to sit at the big money table. That’s nice and makes good PR but this still leaves the Mountain West, WAC, and C-USA thin on their slate of bowl games. With the current bowl ties the casting director for the bowl games hands are tie to what they have already signed up for.
Keeping with ECU (but there may be several other teams that could fit this bill) might a match up of the Pirates and Alabama (using the projections from Scouts.com) make for a more interesting Chick-fil-A Bowl that a 8-4 Boston College?

As stated before on this blog bowl game are all about bring people to your city to fill hotel and restaurant during the slow holiday season. Organizers are then keen on lock in the best chance of bring people to town for the game and not particularly interesting in the most intriguing games at the end of the season.

Maybe we need a second tier bowl to become a free agent and be willing to gamble on presenting the fans with a interesting game rather than the current locked slate of “if there is nothing else on” games.

Note: When thinking of a tile for this post I remembered a book that I read in 2nd or 3rd grade and putting the title into Google found that you (and maybe me) can buy at copy from Amazon. At $48 cherished memeories are getting expensive.