New Year's eclipse

So a whole pile of Some Bowls have been played the last couple of days, and if you were paying attention maybe you caught snippets of North Carolina and Temple in the What's That Bowl, or Wake Forest and Michigan State in the Hey, You Bowl, or somebody and somebody in the Bad Boys Mowers Gasparilla Bowl (an actual bowl actually played.)

And now on to today's festivities, when something called the Camping World Bowl will be played in, um, Florida, I think.

This bowl has even less chance to blip the radar than the Bad Boys Mowers bowl, because later in the day Clemson plays Ohio State and LSU plays Oklahoma in the two national semifinal games, which are also bowls but I forget which ones. (Cotton and Peach, I believe. But don't hold me to it.) And that's significant because the Camping World Bowl involves a Notre Dame team that, unlike everyone else playing this weekend, is not 6-6 but 10-2.

Think about that for a second: The program with its own private TV deal, the program that can out-lore every other college football program in America, will be an afterthought today. Either the Fighting Irish will beat Iowa State or they won't -- it says here they will, and handily -- and, unless you're an officially licensed Domer, no one is going to notice. Most of America will flip past it the way it flipped past North Carolina-Temple or Michigan State-Wake Forest or Texas A&M and Oklahoma State in the Hi, My Name Is Bowl.

Notre Dame was never supposed to be this kind of warmup act, on account of it's spent a lot of years and money and Knute Rockne Leahys building the game's most enduring and far-reaching brand. When Zephraim Cochran finally invents the warp drive and human beings make first contact with the Vulcans, they'll all be wearing throwback Ron Powlus jerseys. Count on it.

(OK, so not Ron Powlus jerseys. Brady Quinn jerseys.)

In any case, this is a strange case, like a Broadway production playing dinner theater in Hay Bale, North Dakota. It's much more Twilight Zone-y than last year, when Notre Dame actually played in one of the two national semifinal games. And it's the most glaring example, perhaps, that while Brian Kelly has raised Notre Dame football to a level more commensurate with its brand, it still hasn't  gotten to the Clemson/Alabama/LSU/Ohio State level -- or even the 1988 Notre Dame level.

In other words, there is more work to do, as everyone around the program acknowledges to their credit. In the meantime, sit back at noon today and enjoy the Whatchamacallit Bowl.

Sorry. I mean, the Camping World Bowl.