Gator or Car Fixers Bowl for Iowa?

After 1,328 miles in a car over a 7-day period to cover college football, you'll understand if this column is all over the place.

?Wisconsin's Montee Ball has 34 rushing touchdowns this season. He was ranked as the No. 33 high school running back in the nation in 2009 by Rivals. com when he was a senior. Rivals' No. 1 running back that year was Bryce Brown, who washed out at both Tennessee and Kansas State.

Alabama star Trent Richardson (203 rushing yards against Auburn Saturday) was ranked No. 2 by Rivals in 2009, so it's not like those rankings were totally bogus.

? Who knows what those nutty, cuckoo bowl games are thinking before they make their official selections on Dec. 4? I can't tell if Iowa will land in the Gator Bowl or Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas. I do know neither is a grabber.

Figure the Big Ten champ and Michigan for the Rose and Sugar bowls, respectively, the Big Ten title-game loser in the Capital One, Nebraska in the Outback (or Nebraska in the Cap One and the Big Ten runner-up in the Outback), Penn State in the Insight, and then the Gator picks between 6-6 Ohio State and 7-5 Iowa.

The Gator Bowl's SEC team will probably be Florida, which was 3-5 in the SEC. If Ohio State goes through with its decision to participate in a bowl instead of a self-imposed ban to try to lessen upcoming NCAA sanctions, why wouldn't the Gator take the Buckeyes for the marquee value? Especially if ex-Gators coach Urban Meyer decides this week to become the next Ohio State coach, though he surely wouldn't start on the job until after the bowl.

Then you've got the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, and we've got to find a shorter handle for that thing. Look, we in the media use sponsor names all the time. We don't call the Outback Bowl "The Bowl," for instance. We don't call the John Deere Classic "The Classic." We don't call Busch Stadium, Miller Park and Target Field "Stadium," "Park," and "Field."

But the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas? Nope, too clunky. Look, I'm not an unreasonable person (a free battery, a few free oil-changes, wink wink). I'm kidding, of course. It would take at least a free brakes job for me to compromise my professional ethics.

Anyway, that Dec. 31 Car Repairs Bowl in Houston pits the No. 6 Big Ten bowl team against the No. 6 Big 12 bowl team. Except it doesn't, because one or both of those leagues will have two teams in BCS bowls. So it will be the No. 7 Big Ten bowl team against the No. 6 or No. 7 bowl team from the 10-team Big 12. Call me uninspired.

Almost every 7-5 or 6-6 team from a BCS conference scheduled itself into a bowl, and Iowa is one of them. You get a home win over an FCS team (Tennessee Tech), you get a home win over a low-level FBS team (3-8 Louisiana Monroe), and you can go 4-6 the rest of the way to reach some sort of cockamamie bowl.

Your coach gets a bonus, a bunch of university employees and their families get free trips,  and an athletic department usually loses money on the deal while the bowls themselves make out nicely.

It's quite a system.

? Michigan State looked like a championship football team Saturday.

It had its division-title locked up, it practiced on Thanksgiving week for a road game against Northwestern in front of announced crowd of 32,172, and it still played with focus and purpose in winning, 31-17. Don't hand the Big Ten championship to Wisconsin just yet.

Ah, go ahead. The Badgers made that much-praised Penn State defense look pretty feeble Saturday, wouldn't you say? Montee Ball has more touchdowns of any kind this season than Indiana, Minnesota or, yes, Penn State.

? Iowa State gave up over 500 yards in its last two games and still played well defensively against Oklahoma State and Oklahoma.

The Oklahoma part of that may sound like a generous assessment. But had the Cyclones protected the ball better in their 26-6 loss at Oklahoma and had a decent portion of the offense it showed against Oklahoma State the week before, we might now be talking about the greatest two-week stretch in Cyclones football history.

Perhaps Iowa State can win at Kansas State next Saturday and put itself in contention for the Car Fixers Bowl. And no, there's no way the bowl would pair two teams from Iowa. Unless both promise to buy 30,000 tickets each.