As you may have heard, there is a movement afoot to raise the standard for bowl qualification from 6-6 to 7-5.

While this is a step in the right direction, the 7-5 requirement doesn’t address what’s really wrong with bowl season. In an attempt to do that, I hereby submit for consideration the following list of rules for bowl eligibility.

You can go to a bowl game at 6-6 if you want. But you must also follow these rules:

• If you fire your head coach, you are ineligible for a bowl game.

If you don't accept mediocrity, why are you playing in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl?

Last season four teams fired their head coaches for poor performance, and then days later gushed as they accepted invitations to appear in ESPN filler programming. Come on: if your team sucks so bad you’re going to pay somebody $5 million plus to stop coaching it, and your fans stay away in tens of thousands, you should really have the good taste to skip bowl season. Since most schools don't, we're going to make them.

This rule also ensures that no more faceless assistants will be promoted to head coach after a random bowl game victory as interim coach. Has that ever worked out? If all I do here is prevent any future Bill Stewart or Bobby Williams eras, the college football world will be a better place.

• All bowl games must have a real name.

Isn't it sad that most new bowl games don't even bother thinking up a real name for themselves? Apparently a $400,000 sponsorship fee doesn't even give you something to sponsor. If your city isn't cool enough to have something positive uniquely associated with it, it's not cool enough to host a bowl game either.

City nicknames like "Music City" or "Motor City" Bowl will be allowed, provided more than 50% of a random sample can identify which city you mean. And only Las Vegas is awesome enough to have a bowl simply called City Name Bowl. The Las Vegas Bowl also meets, easily, the next requirement:

• All cities wishing to host a bowl game must pass a test of their worthiness as a travel destination.

And here is that test: a random sample of adult males within five hours' drive of the bowl site must -- without mentioning the football game -- say to their friends/girlfriends/wives/children the following sentence:

"Guess what! I'm taking you on a a trip to ___(bowl city name)___!"

If more than 50% of friends, girlfriends, wives and children react negatively to this announcement, your certification to host a bowl game is revoked by the NCAA. Permanently. Are you listening, Jacksonville?

• Every team, not just bowl teams, gets 15 extra practices.

One of the incentives of going to a bowl game is that you get 15 extra practices that non-bowl teams don't. In fact, this is often cited as a major benefit of going to a bowl game. One wonders how many athletic department meetings have been held to discuss the relative value of 15 extra football practices versus the $300,000 the department has to spend on unsellable tickets to the Texas Bowl. That amount of money could fund two or three minor sports for a year. Sports the school may need for Title IX compliance.

Furthermore, the coaching profession attracts the sort of people who work 20-hour days out of fear that someone else might be working 21. This is the road to burnout. So let's eliminate the perceived competitive advantage of going to a bowl game versus not. Don't the wealthy programs have enough advantages without getting more practices too?

All teams get 15 extra practices, to be used at their discretion, between the end of the regular season and the start of next season. Most bowl teams would use them for bowl preparation; non-bowl teams would be more inclined to save them for next season. Teams who have an unsuccessful season would have a little extra reason to be optimistic going into the next one. It's not a high first-round draft pick, but it's something -- more than they're getting now.

• Every four years, you are bowl eligible, regardless of record.

The bowl pimps constantly tell us what a positive experience they are for student-athletes. And yet, every year, thousands of deserving student-athletes are denied this, simply because they play for a bad team. If it's such a great experience, let's let everybody have a turn.

If your school fails to go to a bowl game in three consecutive years, they are automatically bowl-eligible for the fourth year. This ensures that every college football player will go to a bowl game at least once if they play a four-year career. And hey, why not? If ESPN just wants more football to broadcast, this gives it to them in spades. I doubt anyone who watched one of the last six Boise bowls could the difference between that game and a really hard-fought game between 5-7 teams. Could you?

This rule can also be invoked by an eligible, but likely to be overlooked, team, to ensure themselves a bowl trip during a successful season. Like Western Kentucky last year. They played better against LSU than some SEC teams did.

These automatic bids would be staggered over the first four years, so the same schools that haven’t been to a bowl game in ages aren’t all going the same fourth year. We don’t want to create a Bad Football Olympics here.

Intrigued? After the jump, more rules just like these.

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You know Jason Pierre-Paul and Jacquian Williams are still alive in the NFL playoffs this weekend. You'll see them on Sunday afternoon when the New York Giants play the Green Bay Packers in the NFC divisional playoffs. But there's one other former Bull out there. One who seems strangely absent from all the stories coming out of USF Athletics, or the tweets from assistant coaches wishing former players luck.

You all realize Jim Leavitt is coaching this weekend too, right?

Leavitt is the linebackers coach for the San Francisco 49ers, who face the New Orleans Saints this afternoon. The 49ers finished fourth in the NFL in total defense, thanks in large part to their four starting linebackers. Patrick Willis is on his way back to the Pro Bowl. NaVorro Bowman led the team with 143 tackles. And rookie Aldon Smith had 14 sacks and quite honestly got gypped out of his own trip to Hawaii. San Francisco held teams to just 3.5 yards per carry and allowed only three rushing touchdowns the entire season.

I'll be curious to see what Leavitt's future will be, as long as the 49ers defense is in the limelight. Will other teams looking for a defensive coordinator try to pick off position coaches? Leavitt was a defensive coordinator before starting the USF program (he and some guy named Bob Stoops were co-DCs at Kansas State), so he might get that opportunity down the line. For now, he can focus on trying to become the first non-playing former Bull to win a Super Bowl ring.

We've never had anything more than an impromptu get-together with our readers... but it's time to change that. We're going to hold a reader event on Wednesday, December 28, before the USF-Connecticut basketball game at the St. Pete Times Forum, and you're all invited. Collin and I will be there for sure, and I'm excited to finally be in town when someone has the bright idea that we should try and meet the people who read this crap.

We'll be at The Bricks of Ybor (1327 E. 7th Avenue in Tampa) from 6:00-8:00pm to eat, drink, and be merry with our fellow USF fans. Then we'll all head down to the Forum to watch the Bulls get smacked around by 20 points by the defending national champions. But at least we'll have our health, and probably some beers in us.

Hope to see you all there. Actually, if you wouldn't mind RSVPing in the comments, that would help us plan this thing out.

(NOTE FROM JAMIE: I originally wrote this last year, but I'll keep tweaking it and reposting it until dumb things stop happening in the coaching carousel, which will never happen.)

To help you get through the dumbest part of any college football season, here is our cynic's guide to the annual coaching carousel.

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1. New Mexico pre-emptively hires Bob Davie. You know, to make sure they don't miss out on such a hot coaching commodity.

2. Wiseasses on Twitter start making #RonP4 jokes about an embattled coach as his team enters the death spiral.

3. Coach is rumored to be fired. Rumors range in strength from "airtight reporter, airtight sources, this will absolutely happen" to "they totally made it up."

4. Other reporters, instead of trying to confirm or deny the rumor, simply pass it along by saying "it's being reported that" blah blah blah. This keeps readers more or less informed, but also gives them a piece of the action with blog hits, Twitter followers, or personal publicity in case they, too, are looking for a new job.

a. Some reporters actually do try and verify rumors, but it also means they aren't first with the story because they are actually interested in doing good work. In our current shoot-first-ask-questions-later media environment, being first is at least as important as being right.

5. Coach is actually fired.

6. Everyone and their brother draws up a wish list of potential replacements and publishes them, no matter how ridiculous they are.

a. Bob Stoops will be on this list even though he has a top-10 team almost every year and there is absolutely no reason for him to ever leave Oklahoma.

b. Jon Gruden will also be on this list even though he hasn't coached any college football in 20 years, his offense is insanely complicated, and we all saw what Bill Callahan's tenure at Nebraska was like with mostly the same playbook. Oh yeah, and right now THIS GUY is already getting two paychecks (from the Bucs and from ESPN) and would have to take a massive pay cut to return to coaching.

7. See Step 4.

8. ESPN's Joe Schad reports that the coach may be in trouble if he doesn't turn it around soon.

Continue reading this post »

As you all know, we are playing Pitt on Thursday. Something you guys might not be aware of is Toro possibly heading up to Pittsburgh to watch the game. As such, we need some help from you guys about possible signs to make for the game.

The ACC Stole My Other Sign above is an excellent example of what we want and would have been an excellent choice if we didn't see it 50 different times last week in Morgantown.

Give us your suggestions in the comments below by tomorrow night, and we will choose the winner or leave it up to a poll. For the winner, we will send out a prize that we haven't thought of yet.

As an example, Voodoo texted me his entry earlier today, and its going to be pretty tough to beat.

"You broke my heart, Fredo."

You guys always come up with good stuff, so this should be fun.

Good luck guys.