Hokepoints of the Perdue Wonderchicken
I write this column once a year to implore college football fans to use a standard, common, descriptive set of names for the bowl games. Try saying "Copper" instead of "Buffalo Wild Wings" for the next month, and just imagine the savings!!!
In the pantheon of annoyances, I admit that companies paying somebody to make you use their name out of context is far less destructive than, say, a university trading scholastic loans as private securities and then jacking up tuition so shareholders can make more money.
Still, it is annoying. The purpose of language is the communication of ideas, and elegance in this is a thing everybody should appreciate. Names are communicative tools that allow the listener to reference all information stored on that thing. When speaking to another college football fan, the name of the bowl ought to conjure up its history and location and place in the pantheon. A name sponsor is a jerk who butts into the middle of your conversation…
: Hey, Carol-Sue. Guess what: I just bought tickets to the…
: BUFFALO WILD WINGS™ GRIDIRON SPECTACULER!!!!
: Oh that's nice. I have no idea what or where that is.
: You know, Big Ten teams play in it now but it had WAC teams in the '90s.
: Wait, the one they used to play at Arizona right? Wasn't that the…
: INSIGHT DOT COM FOOTBALLING SYNERGY™
: Yeah, that's it. Remember when Iowa played in the…
: GUARANTEE SHOCKED ABSOLUTELY UNIQUE NOW PERSONALIZED FREE ENSURE CRITICAL ACCOMPLISH WINNING RESULTS PROVEN POWERFUL SIMPLE SOLUTION™
…and makes communication of the idea more difficult. Adding syllables (they couldn't call it the B-Dubs Bowl?) adds to the annoyance. It is cold here during bowl season, so I prefer to not expend what limited body heat I have in vocalizing "The Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile Bowl."*
What to Call Them?
Typically unless it's an older bowl just use the name of the city they play in, and if there are multiple bowls in a city start adding numbers (Tampa II, Cotton II, etc.) If everybody knows a bowl as something because it has been called that for decades, obviously use that.
After [the jump] I'll put up a handy chart of the current bowl slate, complete with sounds you can make to accurately relate meaning to another human, and commercial-free graphics that can do the same. You can keep that open as a tab on your phone or whatever as a reference this month.
Click each logo to get the full size. Use however you like.
* [Still more descriptive than "GoDaddy.com Bowl"]
** and † [A couple bowls have higher payouts for one team; I used the highest amount.]
Degrees of Annoyance
The devouring of the Peach
Michigan happens to have drawn one of the worst this year. One man's categories:
Great (just keep the name sponsors off): Rose, Cotton, Gator, Orange, Sugar, Fiesta, Holiday, Liberty, Las Vegas, Poinsettia, Alamo, Hawaii, Heart of Dallas, Music City, Pinstripe, Sun. Either you recognize them from grand old games or they describe the city they're in.
Fine: Outback. Let's appreciate that they a.) have maintained sponsorship, and b.) don't use the full name of the restaurant, allowing the bowl to conjure imagery instead of over-salted food. Just remember the Hall of Fame.
Go Back to the Old Name That We All Knew: Peach, Independence, Citrus, Bluebonnet, Copper, Humanitarian, Tangerine (yes that was the name of a lot of bowls but remembering it's the Citrus's little brother is easy).
Just Get Rid of It: The ones named for cities are just waiting for naming sponsors. We need to offload half the bowls anyway and these make for easy targets: Armed Forces in Fort Worth not to be confused with the military themed one in Washington, D.C., the one in Birmingham, the second one in Tampa, the one formerly known as Queen City, the San Fran one, the one in Mobile that's never had a good name, the one in Detroit, New Mexico, that other military one in D.C., New Mexico, New Orleans.
December 10th, 2013 at 10:49 AM ^
and the former Copper/Insight bowl will be renamed the Chipotle Flaming Stool Bowl.
December 10th, 2013 at 11:29 AM ^
But I think Ass Blaster Hot Sauce is the sponsor, not Chipotle.
December 10th, 2013 at 11:57 AM ^
and Ass in Space hot sauce, but no Ass Blaster.
December 10th, 2013 at 12:38 PM ^
December 10th, 2013 at 1:00 PM ^
or do you have to take it with food?
December 10th, 2013 at 1:02 PM ^
and allow a slow trickle.
December 10th, 2013 at 10:55 AM ^
Mother Theresa was a fine potato.
December 10th, 2013 at 10:56 AM ^
I think the Citrus Bowl was called the Tangerine Bowl way back when. When the name changed to the Citrus Bowl, did another bowl adopt the Tangerine Bowl name?
December 10th, 2013 at 5:01 PM ^
But the full name was actually Florida Citrus Bowl, after the Florida-based orange juice manufacturer:
AFAIK the term "Tangerine" was retired after that.
December 10th, 2013 at 11:01 AM ^
that most of the original names or non-corporate names are just as annoying as the new corporate ones, so I am just going to call them what they are called.
And shut that whorish mouth about Outback Steakhouse. That is top quality five star fare. i could go for some Kookaburra's right now. Those are the REAL wings of bowl season.
December 10th, 2013 at 11:07 AM ^
Are absolutely Effing amazing.
Best wings I've had - like them much better than anything else (non - mom/pop) available.
December 10th, 2013 at 11:23 AM ^
were also like 50x times better like ten years ago. Usually I disagree when people say quality has gone down with specific foods (like BW3 - I think they have stayed pretty consistent despite many people telling me they are not as good), but Kookaburras used to seriously be the biggest, best chicken wings on the planet. What is left is a little smaller, and not quite seasoned the same way. And the drop from 10 wings to 8 burned me as well. They are still magical though.
December 10th, 2013 at 11:08 AM ^
I don't mind the Peach Bowl becoming the Chick-fil-A Bowl in common lingo. The #1 at Chick-fil-A is so good, its so good when it hits your lips. They makes you crave it fortnightly by, I believe, putting little sprinkles of cocaine or the like in the breadding. Then the go so far as to offer their special Chick-fil-A sauce, a tasty combination of ingredients including crystal meth, I believe. Throw in some waffle fries and a soda and your mind asplodes.
Wait, what were we talking about again??
December 10th, 2013 at 11:53 AM ^
December 11th, 2013 at 12:51 PM ^
Or the time he noted that "You can't spell Citrus without UT."
December 10th, 2013 at 11:09 AM ^
Wasn't Detroit's bowl the Cherry Bowl first?
December 10th, 2013 at 11:13 AM ^
at the Silverdome during the mid 1980s.
December 10th, 2013 at 11:48 AM ^
December 10th, 2013 at 11:09 AM ^
Tampa 2? We're naming bowl games after defenses now?
And how many of these Military/ArmedForces/SALUTE Orwellian bowls actually have a gnat's ejaculation worth of relation to our men & women in uniform?
/ this post brought to you by Carl's, Jr.
December 10th, 2013 at 12:17 PM ^
It's not really in Tampa, it's in Saint Petersburg in a dome... Which makes no sense at all because it's Florida, not Russia... I prefer to call it the Eat Beef Bowl after the Reverend Horton Heat's song "Eat Beef".
December 10th, 2013 at 12:30 PM ^
We could also have the "It's Martini Time Bowl" (replaces this year's Copper Bowl since we will all need one).
December 10th, 2013 at 12:50 PM ^
December 10th, 2013 at 12:58 PM ^
Except when it's made with Absolut Peppar, garnished with blue-cheese stuffed olives.
Gin martinis are great too, though.
December 10th, 2013 at 1:57 PM ^
Without vermouth, vodka or gin. Personally, I think a Polish potato vodka makes the best martinis, but it's in my DNA to prefer the distillate of tubers.
However, I can pretty easily get behind a Bombay Sapphire or Hendricks gin martini as well.
December 10th, 2013 at 2:22 PM ^
Though I don't like them dirty, for my martini, it must have olives.
December 10th, 2013 at 4:10 PM ^
December 10th, 2013 at 6:56 PM ^
exactly so.
December 11th, 2013 at 12:52 PM ^
I like 'em both!
December 10th, 2013 at 3:19 PM ^
To #19: I think both teams should be required to play Tampa 2 defense the entire time.
December 10th, 2013 at 11:11 AM ^
I'll insert here my yearly plug for referring to the Fight Hunger/San Francisco bowl as the Emerald Bowl (as it was from 2004-2009). This fits in the same category as "Outback" in that it's ultimately a corporate sponsorship (Emerald Nuts, owned by then-sponsor Diamond of California), but at least it's one that evokes an image (San Francisco as the Emerald City, an image I rather like) as much as an oversalted food.
The Bay Bowl would of course also be acceptable, both for accuracy and for sheer alliterative appeal.
December 10th, 2013 at 12:21 PM ^
Also more generally I'd rather that instead of getting rid of the only SF bowl game we get rid of one of our plethora of Houston or Dallas bowls. Generally speaking, I'd prefer to have a more even geographic distribution of bowl games. Mostly nicer weather locales? Sure makes sense. But heading to other touristy cities - like SF, NYC, and as one of the MGoEditors once suggested (cant remember who) Denver - ought to be on the docket too.
December 10th, 2013 at 1:23 PM ^
can they play on Alcatraz?
December 10th, 2013 at 11:11 AM ^
Traces it's lineage back to 1959, though it experienced about a twenty year hiatus before its new launch in 2006.
The Capital One / Tangerine / Citrus Bowl is all one and the same. First there was the Tangerine Bowl played at the Citrus Bowl, then then there was the Florida Citrus Bowl played at the Citrus Bowl, then there came the Capital One Bowl played at the Florida Citrus Bowl.
The Tangerine Bowl came back for two years, 2002-2003 as the Mazda Tangerine Bowl and then was renamed the Russell Athletic Bowl, sort of. It seems the Russell Athletic Bowl has had about eleventy twelve names since 1990.
December 10th, 2013 at 11:14 AM ^
Thanks to 5/3 Bank, the Orlando soccer team that plays in the Citrus Bowl plays at what is called "Fifth Third Bank Field at the Citrus Bowl"
... Holy mother of corporate sponsorship
December 10th, 2013 at 11:25 AM ^
DON'T YOU DARE GET RID OF MY PIZZA PIZZA BOWL DAMNIT!
December 10th, 2013 at 11:27 AM ^
For the Weyland/Yutani Bowl. Complete with android overlords and the corporate anthem.
/ dystopian'd
December 10th, 2013 at 11:32 AM ^
I think Tecmo should sponsor a bowl game.
December 10th, 2013 at 12:05 PM ^
Okay? What the heck would they even call it?
December 10th, 2013 at 1:25 PM ^
The Tecmo Super Tecmo Bowl.
I would go every year.
December 10th, 2013 at 12:41 PM ^
December 10th, 2013 at 12:19 PM ^
Pitting the Xavier Xenomorphs against the Providence Predators. Should be a barn-burner.
December 10th, 2013 at 11:47 AM ^
December 10th, 2013 at 12:01 PM ^
Just imagine the fast food tie-ins. You could name it the Weedeater Bowl and put it in Boulder.
December 10th, 2013 at 12:09 PM ^
Betty Crocker Brownie Bowl, Bong Bowl? Head Shop Bowl? Guess I'm dating myself with the last one.
December 10th, 2013 at 12:08 PM ^
For the IJ reference.
December 10th, 2013 at 12:10 PM ^
I still yearn for the days when the Beef O'Brady's Bowl was simply known as the Magicjack.com St. Petersburg Bowl. The same goes for the MicronPC.com Bowl now being the Russell Athletic Bowl, but alas it was the Blockbuster Bowl before any of these. There was just something so unobtrusive about corporate sponsorship back in the day.
December 10th, 2013 at 12:18 PM ^
I would like to point out that the Military Bowl/DC bowl is no longer being played in DC, rather it's at Navy's Stadium in Annapolis (which means no beer...but I digress). I am therefore in full support of renaming it the Old Bay Crab Bowl or something similar.
December 10th, 2013 at 5:38 PM ^
Meh. I don't want crabs.
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