By Jimmy Hyams

Growing up in North Louisiana, surrounded by pine trees, the Cane River and a bushel full of future NFL quarterbacks (Terry Bradshaw, Joe Ferguson, Bert Jones, Doug Williams, etc.), I loved watching bowl games.

Bowls were a measure of success for a college team.

If you didn’t go 7-3 or better, you were home for the holidays.

One year, 1969, a 9-1 LSU team got locked out of the bowls when Notre Dame changed its policy and accepted a bid to the Cotton Bowl.

LSU had been ticketed for the Cotton. When that fell through, there weren’t 40 other bowls for LSU to pick from.

I first became fixated on bowls in 1965.

At that time, there were nine bowls. And bowls were a reward for a good or great season – not for going 6-6 or 5-7.

Those nine bowls: The Sugar, Rose, Orange, Cotton, Liberty, Sun, Gator, Bluebonnet and Tangerine.

By 1975, we had 11 bowls – the Fiesta and Peach were added.

By 1985, we had 18: the new additions were the Independence, Holiday, Cherry, California, Aloha, Freedom and Hall of Fame.

In 1995, we still had 18, although some were added and some were dropped.

Then came the boom in bowls.

In 2005, we had 28.

In 2015, we had 41.

When the Bowl Championship Series started in 1998, there were 22 bowls. And some thought the national championship game would ruin – or diminish – the importance of all other bowls.

Yet, since the advent of the BCS, we’ve had 19 new bowls – 19!

You can argue many of the bowls are meaningless to the masses, but the BCS and College Football Playoff haven’t made those lower-tire bowls anymore meaningless than they already were.

Are there too many bowls for my liking? Yes.

You’ve got too many bowls when 5-7 teams fill slots.

You’ve got too many bowls when 6-6 teams fill slots. But there are exceptions to a .500 team going bowling.

Tennessee in 2014 is an example. The Vols hadn’t been to a bowl game in three years; hadn’t won a bowl in seven years.

More than 40,000 Vol fans showed up in Jacksonville to watch UT whip Iowa. It was a positive experience for supporters, players and a second-year coach trying to build a program.

But that’s an exception.

And this year might be an exception for Tennessee as well, if Jeremy Pruitt can show improvement after inheriting a 4-8 team.

Yes, teams that play in bowls enjoy the experience. I would enjoy a free trip to Hawaii, but that doesn’t mean I deserve it. And I don’t think 6-6 or 5-7 teams are “deserving’’ of playing in a bowl game. You shouldn’t be rewarded for average or below-average performance.

But you are rewarded for mediocrity under the current structure due to the plethora of bowls.

Certainly, I don’t have to watch a bowl game that I that don’t want to. But I would still prefer that teams invited to bowls earn the right to play in the postseason.

Bowl games do help with the economic impact of a city and in raising funds for charity.

But I wonder how many cities might lose money by hosting a bowl game and paying out $750,000 per team.

Twenty-five bowls seems like a nice number to me.

That way, you don’t have to worry about 6-6 or 5-7 teams getting bowl bids and bowl gifts.

It would add to the prestige of going bowling.

And you reward the more deserving teams.

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