Insight Bowl officials admit to picking Iowa State over Missouri because of ticket sales, not merit

Perhaps the greatest college football tradition this time of year is the annual exploration into the absurdities of the postseason bowl selection process. With the the major conference championships decided last weekend and only the Army-Navy game separating football fans from a multi-week procession of mostly meaningless bowl games, one particular illogical bowl match-up stands out above all others.

The Kansas City Star reported on Monday that the Insight Bowl won’t invite a Missouri Tigers team that finished with a 8-4 record and a second place finish in the Big 12 North to play in its nationally-televised New Year’s Eve game. Instead, that bowl will invite the Iowa State Cyclones, an evermore mediocre 6-6 team with a loss to Missouri on its record.

In a move that smacks of rubbing a reasonable sports fan’s nose in a pile of financially-motivated and illogical dung, Insight Bowl officials admitted that they wanted the inferior Cyclones to play a slightly superior bowl game not because they would make a better match-up against their opponent. Instead, bowl officials chose Iowa State to play Minnesota because they figured more Iowa State fans would buy tickets to the game instead of Missouri fans.

“Ultimately, (Insight Bowl CEO John) Junker cited Iowa State’s record of sending more than 20,000 fans to a previous Insight Bowl, a record for that bowl.” — via The Kansas City Star.

There you have it, in all its bold and nakedly dimwitted glory: College football postseason games are determined not by merit or records or achievement, but rather a forecast of how many fans from a given school have the type of disposable income to travel and buy tickets to what amounts to a meaningless football game.

Bowl games by themselves wouldn’t have to be so pointless if there was a logical and merit-based system governing the match-ups of various postseason games. But when the bowl selection process is overtaken by the decidedly business-driven — as opposed to athletic- and outcome-driven — attitudes of people like John Junker, postseason college football entirely lacks a purpose or any real sense of relevancy. Can Minnesota Golden Gopher fans really feel all that swell about beating a mediocre team that was offered up to them by a system that determines games by ticket sales? Only if those fans embrace the bottom-rung line of thinking that permeates college football’s anti-competitive system.

Meanwhile, Missouri will have to settle for a lesser Texas Bowl game against Navy, despite its credentials that would support a case for a stronger bowl. In the long list of indignities suffered by Missouri football, this Texas Bowl invitation ranks up there with the ignominy of its 1990 defeat to the hands of the Colorado Buffaloes, the beneficiaries of a colossal screw up by officials who awarded an infamous and illegal fifth down play to decide the outcome.

But unlike the publicly-shamed officials in the Fifth Down Play, it’s unlikely that the NCAA — the tax-exempt yet money-grubbing organization that sanctions these bowls — or the Insight Bowl will cop to its mistake. They will settle instead for blithe rationalizations to a truly irrational decision.