In years past I was always glued to the TV watching the football bowl games on New Years Day. For the past couple of years I have not watched any of the games. The bowl games really ended for me with the death of the Southwest Conference. To me the National Championship was always the Cotton Bowl, which was the Southwest Conference Champs and some other great team. The only other bowls were the Sugar Bowl and the Rose Bowl and those featured teams in which I had no interest except to watch on New Years Day.

Now there are so many bowl games, it’s just mass confusion and they are played all through the first few weeks of January. The Cotton Bowl wasn’t even played on New Years Day this year and I really don’t care because there is no Southwest Conference anymore. The Big 12 is made up of a lot of teams that I have no interest in, like Kansas. When I was a kid it was just the great Texas teams of the Southwest Conference and the outsider Arkansas. Arkansas really didn’t count to me and Texas Tech and University of Houston were just new kids on the block and really didn’t matter. My team, Baylor, never won anything but I was proud they were a member of the elite Southwest Conference.

The so called National Championship doesn’t hold much interest to me unless there is a Texas team playing. The only Texas team that has a shot at that game is UT because of their great size and wealth. UT should now be a professional team rather than being in the college ranks. In the old days SMU, TCU, Rice and even Baylor were contenders and had a shot at the Southwest Conference title. Even in the old days, Texas and A&M were the powers and their great match up was on Thanksgiving.

There are now so many pro teams playing every night of the week that the Super Bowl will eventually be moved to spring. The Super Bowl has even become just another average event. The demise of Tom Landry and America’s Team made me lose interest in the pro world much the same as occurred with the breakup of the Southwest Conference in the college world.

So, I’m now just content with watching old movies on TCM during the New Years Holiday. I prefer the black and white movies just like I once preferred the Cotton Bowl and the Southwest conference.