I'm for 6-win bowl teams, but for one reason only

So now Big Ten athletic directors, Iowa's Gary Barta among them, are pounding a drum for seven wins being the minimum for a college football team to go to a bowl game.

Naturally, I'm suspicious. Is it really to put some sort of quality-control on the postseason? Why now after so many years of so much flotsam and jetsam in the postseason?

Or is it it to rid themselves of the weird, lowest-level bowls that frequently have one or two 6-6 teams, and provide little hope for participating teams to make profitst, let alone come close to breaking even?

Last year, the 6-win teams in bowls attended the Beef O'Brady's Bowl (Marshall), the Las Vegas Bowl (Arizona State), the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl (Purdue), the Pinstripe Bowl (Iowa State), the Music City Bowl (Mississippi State and Wake Forest), the Meineke Car Care Bowl (Northwestern and Texas A&M), the Liberty Bowl (Vanderbilt), the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl (Illinois and 6-7 UCLA), the Gator Bowl (Ohio State), and the BBVA Compass Bowl (Pittsburgh).

That's 13 teams, or 6 1/2 bowls worth.

Iowa played in the 2006 Alamo Bowl as a 6-6 team.

It's all a joke and we've all known it's a joke. But what's the worse joke, a 6-6 team going to a bowl, or major programs scheduling themselves even softer nonconference games -- perhaps two contests against FCS teams -- to help get to seven wins.

The moment the bowl-requirement is raised to seven wins, phone wires will be ablaze with FBS-school ADs calling FCS-school ADs to line up more games. Crummy games, in many cases.

Northern Iowa Athletic Director Troy Dannen is a straight-shooter. He told this to the Des Moines Register recently:

"A seven-win requirement will help us from a leverage standpoint. If the FBS goes to seven wins (for bowl eligibility), it will help us."

The Big Ten has an upcoming agreement to have their teams play one nonconference game a year against Pac-12 teams. That's good, I guess, depending on who you're paired against. I can live without Indiana-Oregon State and Minnesota-Utah, but I'll watch USC-Wisconsin and Oregon-Michigan. I'd love to see Iowa take its cuts against a good Pac-12 team, like Mike Leach's Washington State crew if Leach gets the Cougars up to his old Texas Tech standards.

But for the rest of the Big Ten nonconference games, it's going to be even more tilts with the Mid-American Conference and FCS team, even though the rule as it currently stands only lets you count one win over FCS teams toward bowl-eligibility.

And 7-5 will become the new 6-6.

This is coming from someone who has mocked 6-6 teams going to bowls, and the bowls that have welcomed them. But upon further review, I'd rather have a lot of chaff among the bowl lineup's wheat instead of even more dumbing-down of the September schedules.