Dec 23, 2016 4 min read

Remember when bowl games mattered?

Remember when it was an honor to play in a bowl game?

If you answered yes to either of those questions, you’re probably pretty old. You’d have to remember when there were four bowl games that mattered and they were all played on New Year’s Day.

Cotton.

Sugar.

Orange

Rose.

Gator mattered a little but it was more of a consolation game for the teams that didn’t make it to the big four and it was played in December.

There are 41 bowl games this year.

Chris McCaffrey of Stanford won’t be playing in one of them. His team is going to the (insert sponsor here) Sun Bowl but he announced two weeks ago that he was skipping it so he can prepare for the NFL draft. That could mean that he’ll be practicing all the drills he’ll be doing at the NFL combine because his ridiculously successful career as a Stanford running back just doesn’t give scouts enough to go by.

Mostly, it’s about not getting hurt and blowing the potential $10 or $12 million signing bonus he might get as a high first-round pick.

His decision was a gift to the sports talk show industry and became the No. 1 topic for a few days.

Some called him selfish.

Some called him smart.

Put me down for smart. If he were my son, I might have told him to shut it down before the last game of the season Nov. 26. Hey, it was against Rice.

How would you like to blow out your knee while blowing out Rice?

If it’s all about a business decision, I might advise the kid to shut it down as soon as he’s pretty sure he’s going to be picked in the first round.

That would include shutting it down before the season started if he could be sure he’d still be a first round pick.

Who cares about the commitment he made when he accepted the scholarship? McCaffrey’s head coach, David Shaw, gave him his blessing.

Nobody csares about the (insert sponsor here) Sun Bowl.

How many NFL draft picks will be playing for the Final Four teams in the playoff? Why should they risk injury?

The NCAA has done everything in its power to operate as a farm system for the NFL and the fact McCaffrey’s coach is OK with him skipping a bowl game should be a signal to every kid on his team, who has any chance of making the NFL, that the game’s really not that important.

And if you think it’s only a good business decision for potential early round picks to sit out, keep in mind that Antonio Brown was taken in the sixth round.

It’s obviously the beginning of a trend and it will mean the bowl games will make up for being meaningless by having the teams leave their best players at home.

If that would ultimately lead to, say, 14 bowl games instead of 41, who’s going to complain?

• The Pirates signed Ivan Nova to a three year contract worth $26 million. His lifetime ERA is 4.30. That’s mediocre. Spare me the sabremetrics.

• Pitt lost an offensive coordinator and an athletic director this week. What else is new?

• Jaromir Jagr moved into second all time in NHL points Thursday night. All he needs to do to catch the guy in front of him, Wayne Gretzky, is average 90 points a season and play until he’s 55.

• You’re bound to hear a lot of whining during bowl season about college football players not being paid but the media should be giving 10 times the attention to the story about academic fraud at North Carolina. The NCAA filed it’s third notice of allegations pertaining to bogus courses being taken by football and basketball players from 2005 to 2011.

It’s possible that UNC’s 2005 national championship in basketball could be vacated.

We can only hope.

John Steigerwald writes a weekend sports column for the Observer-Reporter.