Bowled over

We are now in the very beating heart of bowl season, which the Blob eagerly awaits every year because every year they add more exhibition games, er, Very Important Postseason Bowls.

This means the Blob can still hold out hope that the Shredded Tire Bowl will someday be a reality, and also the Luke Duke Jorts Bowl, and also the Oscar Mayer Bologna And Miracle Whip Bowl.

Alas, so far no luck. But at least we'll always have the fabulously epic First Responder Bowl.

OK, so, no. No, we won't.

This is because the First Responder Bowl did not, well, respond to expectations yesterday. Boston College and Boise State lined up and commenced playing down there in Dallas, and then an apocalyptic thunderstorm moved in, and there was a lightning strike and another and another -- six in all, eventually -- and by the time the lightning strikes were done, three hours had gone by with nothing much to show.

And so, at somewhere just past 3:30 p.m. local time in Dallas, they canceled the game.

Yes, you heard that right. They canceled a bowl game -- and not at, like, midnight, but in the middle of the afternoon. Just said, "Ah, to hell with it."

This just reinforces what the Blob has thought for some time, which is that the advent of the College Football Playoff has reduced 99 percent of all bowl games these days to meaningless exhibitions. And even the people putting them on realize it.

It's why more and more potential NFL draft picks opt to bail on them these days, to the grumbling of old-school types who cling to the quaint notion that high-end college football is still some rah-rah, all-for-one, one-for-all enterprise.

It's not. It's a business, and the players are the workforce, employed by the university for relative peanuts to sell the university's athletic brand. And so it should not be any surprise at all that the players have come to see it that way, too.

If their schools are building their brand on the "student-athletes'" backs, the "student-athletes" are in turn building their own brands in anticipation of the big payday at the next level. It's sort of an implied reciprocal relationship, which is why most coaches don't get all that bent out of shape when one of their future NFL draft picks opts out of the bowl game to better prepare for the draft -- and also to avoid a possible injury that would damage their draft stock.

In the meantime, enjoy the bowl games. Just remember what it is you're watching.

And also what it is you're not.