I said the other day I miss watching college football bowl games. And I do.

But some weird stuff, some disturbing stuff, is going on over there. Changes I was not completely up to speed on because the disconnect between U.S. college football and the Middle East is just about total.

To wit:

1. What is TCU doing in the Rose Bowl? I don’t care what their record is, a Pac-10 team should have been there. Stanford, in specific. As long as the Rose Bowl is saddled with the Big Ten — which can’t win at the elite level but at least travels well; did you see all the Wisconsin red in the crowd? — it should have a Pac-10 team there, too. Yeah, I know, some BCS rules made this happen the way it did. But the point of the BCS was to save the bowl games … but in saving the bowl games the BCS appears to have destroyed them. Much more of this, and I’m going to have to join the people yammering for a playoff system.

2. espn.com, which for better or worse is my communications line back to U.S. sports, had someone so intellectually bankrupt editing last night that they wrote the ridiculous (and patently incorrect) headline “TCU silences critics …” Not this one. (And critics are never silenced. They just tweak their arguments.)

Consider: TCU played a schedule that included Tennessee Tech, Baylor, SMU, Colorado State, Wyoming, UNLV and New Mexico. Not even the softest out-of-conference scheduling by the most cynical SEC teams can produce that many middling-to-crappy teams on a schedule. Don’t tell me TCU is a great team when it barely beat Wisconsin of the Big Ten, which has been getting mauled in bowl games for a decade. Don’t tell me that a team that was tied 21-21 Oregon State (which finished 5-7) is a great team. And don’t tell me that TCU getting to 12-0 was even remotely as challenging as how Auburn and Oregon did it. The champion of any of the major conferences did more than TCU did. And I like TCU. Let’s just not get all worked up and say that a season with about four good wins compares to what the guys in the SEC, the Pac-10, the Big Ten, the Big 12 go through. Three months of rivalry games.

3. I am annoyed that espn.com has sold out to the corporate naming rights people and stuck all the sponsors names on the bowls. I read a story about how Mississippi State, I believe it was, scored “more points than any team in the history of the Capital One Bowl game, which goes back to 1947.” OK, fine, but what in hell is the Capital One Bowl? What was it born as? Was it the Peach Bowl? The Citrus Bowl? What was it historically, and why isn’t that name still in the title? And why other calling it the Rose Bowl Presented by VIZIO … when Vizio (no caps in my world) will be out of the picture in five years (who was it who came before? I don’t even remember now). But at least the Rose Bowl guys have the stones to insist that “the Rose Bowl” comes before the advertisement. And kudos to the L.A. Times for not caving in; it’s still the Rose Bowl there.

And I went to wikipedia to find this: The Capital One Bowl was the Tangerine Bowl, before it sold out.  But who was the Go-daddy.com Bowl, in a previous life? Who were the Little Caesars Bowl, the Champs Sports Bowl, the Ticketcity Bowl, the Chick-fil-A Bowl?

3. I still have nine days to wait till the national title game? That’s too late. Way too late. I’m sure it’s about getting out of the way of the NFL, but why couldn’t it have been played on, say, Friday? January 7? Or even Thursday, January 6? No NFL those days. Why are we stalling till January 10? To make it a Monday Night Football game, I suppose. As if college fans wouldn’t watch the game on a Thursday night.

Anyway, I’m irked. It was nice to see the ol’ stadium in the Arroyo Seco filled to capacity. But that would have happened no matter who was there. Stanford people, for example, would have packed the place, considering they haven’t been in the Rose Bowl since Nixon’s first term.

Sigh.