The MOST INTERESTING bowl game

Yes, bowl games have already started and they'll continue to come fast and furious for the next couple weeks or so. Any more, because there's so many of them, a team has to be pretty bad NOT to qualify for one. In the end, it's all about the money. Even "garbage" bowls are a big payday for schools. Pack up the band and go play somewhere. TV and their long list of advertisers will be behind your school receiving a fat check. It's the American way.

No doubt, most attention will be paid to the Sugar and Rose Bowls on New Year's day. In the former #4 Alabama takes on #1 Clemson in New Orleans starting at roughly 6 PM (eastern standard time).

That will be followed by #2 Oklahoma tangling with #3 Georgia in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena starting at roughly 9 PM.

The winners of those two bowls will meet for the national championship a week later.

OK, everybody knows that -- right? So get on with it already, you might rightfully think at this point.

But the MOST INTERESTING bowl game will already be over before the four "titans" clash later on.

That would be the Peach Bowl, in Atlanta, set to go off at about 1 PM on the same day.

That will feature the Auburn Tigers taking on the Central Florida Knights.

It should be noted that a little over a month ago, that same Auburn team defeated the then #1 Georgia Bulldogs. A couple weeks later, they also knocked off then #1 Alabama. Back-to-back wins over #1 ranked teams -- both convincingly so -- is very impressive stuff.

Alas, Auburn would get drubbed in the rematch with the Dawgs for the SEC championship, which knocked them out of the Final Four.

But here's the kicker. Central Florida, though playing in a "lesser conference", is the only team in the Top Ten that remained undefeated through the entire regular season. Yet no way was the mysterious "committee" going to give them a shot at a national title. So they got relegated to the Peach Bowl.

Thing is, what if -- and it could happen, even though the odds-makers have Auburn as a 9-10 point favorite -- the Knights were to not only defeat the Tigers, but convincingly so?

Despite what happened between the above mention OU, UG, UA, and Clemson, UCF could proudly claim to be the only undefeated team at the end of the year. That, and having just defeated a team that knocked off two #1's a mere month before?

True, the media spin doctors would get busy burying it, and all eyes and acclaim would go to the "champs".

But if that scenario played out, it would be pretty hard to explain why UCF, schedule notwithstanding, including enduring the hardship of having a few games cancelled due to Hurricane Irma, wasn't even given a chance to prove how good they could be with the "big boys" in crunch time, given they just knocked one off.

I, for one, hope they trounce Auburn (nothing against the Tigers).

Because if there was ever a case to be made to expand the college football national championship playoff field to at least eight teams, this would be Exhibit A.

I mean, c'mon. What else are college football players at big time programs doing during the month of December? Studying for finals? Puhleeze. Most of these guys couldn't pass a seventh grade equivalency exam given 10 tries. Who's kidding who?

So why not expand the playoff field and let these precious "student-athletes", long a laughable term only the most gullible still buy into, play another game? Which they're raring to do anyway? The schools would make more piles of do-re-mi, and those that were unfairly shut out due to a numbers game -- like Central Florida -- would get the shot they deserve.

For the life of me, I don't see any downside to it.

"Little" schools in "lesser" conferences don't deserve a shot at a championship?

One need only harken back to the spring of this year, when tiny Gonzaga, a private school in the far northwest, made it all the way to the NCAA hoops final before finally succumbing -- barely -- to mighty behemoth North Carolina.

Consider that Exhibit B, and I rest my case, your honors.