The MJ4MF Bowl

It’s college bowl season, and there is an impressive line-up of games, from the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, to the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl, to the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl, to the GoDaddy.com Bowl, to the…

Oh, for Pete’s sake.

There are no fewer than eight college football bowls that have completely abandoned any pretense of respecting tradition. The name of the bowl is isomorphic with the name of the sponsoring company. Sure, some bowls give a nod to tradition by appending the name of the sponsor to the historical name, such as the Allstate Sugar Bowl or the Discover Orange Bowl. But even in those cases, the sponsor is listed before the bowl itself.

What can you do? My daddy always told me, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!”

Following his sage advice, I’d like to announce the 2013 Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks Bowl, which already has a spiffy logo…

But the MJ4MF Bowl will be different than the others. There have to be rules. My rules.

First, the game must be played on January 3, 2013, which can be written as 1/3/13. (Nice, huh?)

Second, both teams would have to be willing to modify their nicknames — only temporarily, of course — to make them more mathy. For example,

• Arizona State Sum Devils
• East Carolina πrates
• Navy Midpoint Men
• North Texas Median Green
• Penn State Nittany Lines
• Standford Cardinality
• Tulane Sine Wave
• UCLA de Bruijn Sequences
• Western Kentucky Hilltopologists

Third, and most importantly, the yard lines on the field would need to be renumbered. Currently, they are numbered as follows:

|0    1|0    2|0    3|0    4|0    5|0    4|0    3|0    2|0    1|0    0|

That’s just dumb. For the MJ4MF Bowl, the yard lines will be numbered like this:

-5|0    -4|0    -3|0    -2|0    -1|0    0    1|0    2|0    3|0    4|0    5|0 

Honestly, doesn’t that make more sense? The middle of the field would be the 0-yard line, which seems appropriate; and, now when you hear, “The Lions have the ball on the 10-yard line,” you won’t have to wonder, “Which 10-yard line?”

Finally, teams will not have to meet the onerous NCAA bowl eligibility requirements to participate in the MJ4MF Bowl. Why does a team need six wins to be bowl eligible, anyway? That just means they’ll demand a big pay-out, and unless a rich, eccentric math geek buys a million copies of Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks in the next week, well, that’s just not gonna happen.

Two exciting teams are currently sought to play in the inaugural MJ4MF Bowl. Notre Dame and Alabama are required to play for the national championship, and the likes of Georgia, Kansas State, and Nebraska have already agreed to other bowl games… but surely the Golden Eagles of Southern Miss (0-12) and the Akron Zips (1-11) are available, no?