Big Ten must have hired a much-better travel agent

Here's how you run a major-college conference:

1) Poach schools that can help you add either marquee value or enormous television markets for your television network.

2) Have the lesser of your bowl-affiliations in places people would actually want to visit.

I'm not here to rehash the Big Ten going into Nebraska, Maryland and New Jersey. And it's not true Rutgers is considering hiring Paula Deen.

But there is news today, albeit not the kind of news that will make it to SportsCenter or Dan Patrick's radio show or Joan Rivers' "Fashion Police."

The Big Ten is making official what was already kind of known, which is that it is adding San Diego's Holiday Bowl and San Francisco's Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl to its affiliates for 2014, to join New York's Pinstripe Bowl.

Plus, it sounds like the league will have the Gator Bowl, with which it has a current agreement, rotate Big Ten spots with Nashville's Music City Bowl. The Capital One and Outback bowls (Orlando and Tampa) stay in the Big Ten's mix, and there will be occasional Orange Bowls when the Rose Bowl is usurped by College Football Playoff.

I don't know which Big Ten bowls are getting shown the door, but Houston's Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas (Houston) and the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl in Tempe, Ariz., seem like goners to the conference after 2013. I don't know about the Heart of Dallas Bowl, and the less said about the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl in Detroit, the better.

Let's frame this in simple, human terms: Mediocre Big Ten bowl teams could end up in New York, San Diego or San Francisco. That beats the pigskin out of Houston, Jacksonville, and yes, Phoenix. I know a lot of Iowans love Arizona, live in Arizona, or have half their extended families in Arizona. But Iowa has been to two Tempe bowls, and played ASU in Tempe, and played Arizona in Tucson, so it's been there, been there, been there, been there, done that.

If you think New York in late December is too cold a proposition, you missed Iowa's last Orange Bowl trip. That wasn't much warmer. In fact, "warmer" isn't an appropriate term. It was cold in Miami, which was both absurd and disgusting.

If you can't have a good time in New York or San Francisco or San Diego, don't sit by me on the airplane, because you'd probably complain that the airline's pretzels weren't fresh enough. Which they aren't, by the way, but I never mention it.

I don't know why I'm dwelling on this topic, since my industry or life itself doesn't guarantee me the chance to cover an Iowa-Utah Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl. The first Big Ten/Pac-10 Battle By The Bay won't be until December 2014. But I wouldn't fight the assignment. It's San Francisco.

I've covered bowls in El Paso, Atlanta, Memphis. It was cold in all three places, and none were San Francisco. I've never covered bowls in Shreveport or Boise or Detroit, but I have it on good authority that none of them are San Francisco.

San Diego? Warm. Ocean. Warm. Ocean.

And should Iowa feel compelled to wind up in a Rose Bowl? Well, that would be interesting, too.