If you’re a Notre Dame Football fan and use Twitter, there’s almost no chance you’ve missed the Twitter account of The Champs Sports Bowl: @ChampsSportsBwl. When they’re not tweeting helpful information about ticket delivery or parking, they’re reminding us that bowl games are people too – and sometimes they’re pretty funny. And sometimes a bowl game and a fan blog find each other, and, like people with magic abilities, make magic happen. However, don’t you think if we had magic abilities, we’d be doing something awesome like bending the world to our will solving global hunger?

We do, however, have this lovely set of questions and answers:

So, growing up, did you always want to be a bowl game? Or were you thinking something more like a Farm Aid or a Monster Truck Rally?

We started as an annual Thanksgiving pickup game between two families. First they got a trophy, then they started making special t-shirts. It was kind of a big deal. Then one year the Galleryfurniture.com Bowl came along and kicked us off the practice field. “Get out of here,” they said. “you couldn’t even be a pre-Christmas bowl game.” So we became a postseason contest on a mission. We plied our trade on the small circuits, first as a Pop Warner Championship game, then an Arena Football League playoff game. Then in 2001, we got the call to be the revived Tangerine Bowl (a.k.a. El Hijo de Tangerine Bowl or Tangerine Bowl, Jr.).

We’ve heard great things about the swag that players in a Champs Sports Bowl game receive. Did you use that to convince certain other bowls to take certain other teams in order to get this ND/FSU match up?

We are bowl enough to admit that there’s probably nothing we can offer with the same bargaining power as a Spicy Chicken Sandwich and waffle fries. If that doesn’t convince you that everything happened above-board, we don’t know what will.

What piece of swag will be the favorite of players this year?

We give them a $420 gift card to Best Buy, so what do the kids like at the Best Buy? Dyson vacuum cleaners? Pre-owned copies of Adele CDs? Those little cords that have the headphone jack on both ends so you can plug it in to your car stereo?

As an unbiased authority, go ahead and settle this debate between us and FSU fans: It’s completely ridiculous that Florida State was given the national title in 1993 after we beat them, right?

The ridiculous part is how close we came that season to having a #1 vs. #2 rematch for the national championship! Who wants to see tha-“That’s an interesting question, [insert name of media member]. It’s yet another example of how Every Game Counts™ in college football’s regular season. We’re happy that the bowl system will reward players and fans with a trip to [insert the name of your city] this December.”

So, Orlando, eh? Anything to do there when football fans aren’t attending your game?

Heck yeah, we’ve got the pantsless mouse, we’ve got the wizard kid, we’ve got like 38 mini golf courses and at least one Five Guys. What else do you need?

What’s a bowl game like you do during down-time?

We watch a lot of sports: regular season basketball, regular season hockey, regular season baseball, you know, the important stuff…We play a lot of NCAA Football, simulating each season (game by game, because Every Game Counts™) and then practicing how we would talk to media about our matchup options. We’re trying to start up an improv troupe called The Incredi-Bowls but nobody is responding to our Evite.

You’ve got a very popular twitter account (@ChampsSportsBwl). Has that caused any of the other bowls to get jealous? Have you had to block any?

We’re still only, like, number seven among bowls on Twitter. Even our big brother @CapitalOneBowl has more people. We’re kinda like the weird, artsy, hipster bowl who makes snarky comments and references pop culture too much. No one ever gets jealous of that type of person. Even if we make it to number one, we’d be all “we showed you!” and everyone else would be like “who is the Champs Bowl?”

50 years from now, when we’re all driving flying cars and walking around with the latest iBrains in our heads, what will the bowl game scene look like? Where do you hope to be?

In the long term: The postseason landscape is a dangerous wasteland. The Harris Poll and the Sagarin Ratings have banded together to control everything. There’s always an undisputed champion, but the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves to survive amongst marauding gangs of All-Star Games. The less fortunate are caught and thrown into Orrin Hatch’s Thunderdome in a single-elimination fight to the death. With a handful of Best Buy gift cards and the yellowing scraps of our 501(c)3 non-profit paperwork, we soldier on, living by the only code we know: choose the best team available or a team within one win. Come with us if you want to live.

In the short term: we look forward to the day when we can trot out the Galleryfurniture.com Bowl to introduce us at our Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

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Thanks very much to the Champs Sports Bowl for answering our questions! And be sure to follow the bowl on Twitter for all your parking info, ticket info, game detail, and humor needs!

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Matt Q. (DMQ)

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