Hawkeyes are part of the real bowl season, not the College Football Playoff drudgery

The hope here is that Iowa and Missouri have similar craziness in Monday’s Music City Bowl to what we’ve seen in so many other second-tier contests over the last two weeks.

Fourteen of those games were decided by one score. The College Football Playoff’s opening four games, meanwhile, were bores. When the better of two teams has a home game that means a lot, the home team usually dominates.

Put a Rutgers and a Kansas State in Phoenix, though, and anything goes. And did in K-State’s 44-41 win after Rutgers led 34-17 midway through the third quarter.

The game meant squadoosh, like all the other non-CFP games. Yet, the players who saw the season through all the way to the end played like they had captured far more than a chance to dump french fries on their coach’s head after the game.

The Dec. 23 Famous Idaho Potato Bowl went two overtimes. The Dec. 24 Hawaii Bowl went five overtimes. The Dec. 26 GameAbove Sports Bowl went six overtimes. Fantastic!

The Armed Forces Bowl would have gone to overtime, but Oklahoma went for a two-point conversion after scoring a touchdown with six seconds left to pull within 21-20, and failed.

Yes, Navy beat Oklahoma. In a football game. It couldn’t have happened in a Cotton Bowl at Jerry Jones’ stadium. It surely could 20 miles away in an Armed Forces Bowl in Fort Worth.

The Sooners had 56 scholarship players, almost half of them freshmen. Their starting quarterback was in the transfer portal and gone. Navy’s roster, as you would expect, was intact.

The whole bowl season is nutso and great fun. East Carolina and North Carolina State players got into a brawl in the last minute of their Military Bowl on Saturday night.

“This isn’t good,” one of ESPN’s game announcers somberly said. I disagree. That players would get so worked up in a Military Bowl was very good.

Saturday’s Pop-Tarts Bowl was so, so better than the garden-variety CFP game. It had it all.

First and foremost, it had a sponsor that had gotten its television presenter to plug its product at least 77,000 times during the telecast. You would have thought the game was on PTN (Pop-Tarts Network) rather than ABC.

Secondly, it had opt-outs galore. First-team All-America wide receiver Xavier Restrepo of Miami took a pass on the game, pun intended. Two other Hurricane receivers opted out. Iowa State third-team All-America receiver Jayden Higgins opted out. So did Cyclone cornerback Darien Porter.

Thirdly, it had two top quarterbacks who put on shows. Miami Heisman-finalist Cam Ward threw three touchdown passes in the first half. So did Iowa State’s Rocco Becht, and the Hurricanes led 31-28 after a wildly entertaining first half.

Then Ward quit at halftime. He got the NCAA record for career touchdown passes he wanted, and he was done. Despite his absence, the Canes scored first in the second half for a 38-28 lead. But Becht went the distance, in more ways than one. He finished an 84-yard touchdown drive on a 1-yard keeper with 56 seconds left, and Iowa State won, 42-41.

Fourthly, the Cyclones got the giant Pop-Tart that goes to the winning team and actually ate some of it.

The game had everything a bowl could ever want including a lot of Iowa fans taking to social media to declare the win was either invalid or comes with an asterisk because of Ward’s early exit. To which the Cyclones responded with a laugh as they munched on their frosted cinnamon roll Pop-Tart.

If you didn’t have a good laugh of your own at some point in the telecast, you need to do some work on yourself in 2025.

I’ve watched more of these lesser bowls this year than normal, and I’ve become a convert. In some weird, warped, maybe wonderful way, Monday afternoon’s Music City Bowl probably will be better than Tuesday night’s Boise State-Penn State Fiesta Bowl.

It won’t be 42-41 and it probably won’t go seven overtimes. The winning coach won’t get doused with iced coffee or mayonnaise.

However, some fired-up, mischievous player will do something he wouldn’t dream of pulling in a regular-season game. If he is clever, great. If not, that’s OK, too.

In the words of John Mellencamp, nothin’ matters and what if it did?

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com