A big bowl of stupid

This is all Dennis Cremeans' fault. That's how the Blob has it figured.

Oh, not Cremeans specifically, understand. You can't hang the nation's disrespect for Indiana football solely on a running back who played for some awful Indiana teams in the mid-seventies. It's more that the nation -- hell, its own conference -- looks at IU football and sees those awful teams for which Cremeans and a whole pile of other guys played, and they assume that's what IU football is and always will be.

Most of the time they'd be right. Which is the problem, or at least the beginning of it.

Assumptions color things, see, and most of those things have to do with eyeballs and the money they bring in from TV. And that's how the second-best team in the Big Ten winds up in some What's It Matter Bowl against the seventh-best team in the SEC. That's how Indiana gets dissed big-time by all the Bowl Stupids, who in this stupidest of all years have managed to look even stupider than usual.

I mean, it's not just that an Indiana team that went 6-1 and lost by a touchdown to a College Football Playoff team (Ohio State) winds up playing 4-5 Ole Miss in the nothing Outback Bowl. And it's not just that a team that finished No. 7 in the Associated Press poll did not, for the first time ever, land in a New Year's Day bowl game.

It's that a twice-beaten and lower-ranked Northwestern team did.

And that a 6-4 Auburn team did.

And that an Iowa State team that lost three times -- including by 17 to a Sun Belt Conference team -- still finished ahead of the Hoosiers and wound up in the Fiesta Bowl against the Pac-12 champs, Oregon.

Travesty upon travesty, all of that. Stupid upon stupid.

And speaking of stupid, how about the Rose Bowl?

Whose website cannot even refer to it as the Rose Bowl because it's also a CFP semifinal game, and because it's been pulled out of California so there's some sort of branding issue.

And where did the Can't Call It Rose Bowl land?

Texas, of course!

Where the Bastard Plague is just as rampage-y as it is in California, but where, unlike California, they don't really care. And so while California has banned spectators at all its sporting events, Texas is still all "Come on down!" 

This means the parents and families and who knows who all will be able to watch Alabama put the boots to Notre Dame in person. This was a sticking point for the Notre Dames in particular, and now the Can't Call It The Rose Bowl people have solved that by putting the Irish in a state that's just as crawling with the Plague, but a lot more cavalier about it.

Meanwhile, on Jan. 2, Indiana will be in Tampa playing a team with a losing record. And Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame are in the CFP because they're Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame. And a 9-2 Army team will be staying at home, its bowl game (the Independence) having been canceled because a bunch of Pac-12 teams were too chicken to play the Black Knights.

Good news, though. At least 3-7 Mississippi State gets to play in a bowl game.

On New Year's Eve.

In the, um, Armed Forces Bowl.

Can't make this stuff up. Can't even.