College football bowl season is upon us once again — technically, it started over the weekend with the Cricket Celebration Bowl (South Carolina State beat Prairie View in a 4-OT thriller) and the Bucked Up LA Bowl (Washington stomped Boise State) — which means that, in addition to the playoff games, it’s time for a bunch of mostly meaningless matchups between mediocre teams, sponsored by increasingly silly companies, often with increasingly silly names, staged in increasingly silly places.

You might think I describe things this way as an insult to the lesser, non-playoff bowls. But I actually love this phase of the season. Thrifty Car Rental Bowl Week on ESPN was my childhood. I have extremely fond memories of Alamo Bowls and Independence Bowls from the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Back in 2018, I wrote a piece in which I (mathematically) rated the absurdity of each bowl in modern college football history. So I think there absolutely should be a place for these weirdo games that give this sport its unique flavor and history, playoffs be damned.

With that firmly at the forefront of our minds, then, I thought it might be fun to rank this year’s crop of bowls (which truly start in earnest on Tuesday) in some of the factors that make up what I would call a bowl’s ABSURD — Aggregate Bowl Silliness, Using Ridiculous Data — score.

Long, overly intricate official monikers — preferably peppered with a “Presented by” or with a “Classic” tacked on at the end — are the lifeblood of silly bowl-game names, and this year’s group has an undisputed champ that took the scene by storm last year: the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl presented by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop. So named to promote Snoop’s line of canned cocktails with Dr. Dre, the 65-character bowl title is the longest by any bowl since 1985 not associated with the playoff (i.e., tossing out things like “College Football Playoff Quarterfinal At The Rose Bowl Presented By Prudential”).

Yes, you read that right. In the bizarro world of bowl absurdity, you aren’t so much interested in blue-chip playoff matchups as you want games between more mediocre teams — ones that probably shouldn’t be playing in bowls at all, if it weren’t for ESPN needing to pad out its December programming. And in that regard, December 29th’s Birmingham Bowl between Georgia Southern and Appalachian State is the most mediocre of all, according to the harmonic mean of the two teams’ pregame Elo ratings. Note, however, that Rice and Texas State in the Armed Forces Bowl (which actually happens in the New Year) and Coastal Carolina and Louisiana Tech in the Independence Bowl aren’t far off, either, so we’ve got choices here!

Another important pillar of bowl-game ridiculousness is simply finding combinations of teams who are likely to score a lot, lighting up the low-stakes matchup’s scoreboard with points. That means teams with capable offenses, yes, but also defenses that are happy to oblige when the other team wants to score as well. This year, the best trio of candidates for that are the 68 Ventures Bowl (Delaware-Louisiana) on Dec. 18, the First Responder Bowl (Florida International-UTSA) on Dec. 27 and another sighting of the Armed Forces Bowl (Rice-Texas State) on January 2. Shield your eyes if you enjoy defense! (Which I assume nobody does if they’re watching Delaware and Louisiana go bowling a week before Christmas.)

An underrated component of silly bowl-gaming is a revolving door of sponsor names, with the more changes in a short period of time, the better. Stability, like the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in Boise being called that every year since shedding its Humanitarian Bowl roots in 2011, is boring. Better instead to be like the StaffDNA Cure Bowl — formerly known as the AutoNation Cure Bowl, Tailgreeter Cure Bowl, Duluth Trading Cure Bowl and Avocados From Mexico Cure Bowl — or the oddly mismatched-sounding Myrtle Beach Bowl presented by Engine — which was previously sponsored by TaxAct, the Visit Myrtle Beach tourism campaign and… nobody.

For all the data on the bowls presented above, sometimes a bowl’s absurdity has to be judged on its vibes as well — things like the businesses sponsoring the games (especially when they brush up against sketchy or embarrassing industries), unintentionally hilarious company names, pretentious naming conventions, and the weirdness of seemingly fly-by-night or hyper-local companies buying national-TV bowl sponsorships. So with that in mind, I put together my own gut ranking of the 2025–26 bowls based on those factors, and then asked ChatGPT to do the same independently. We both landed on Snoop’s Arizona Bowl as the clear No. 1, though we disagreed elsewhere up and down the list. (I still can’t stop imagining what Cheez-Its mixed with citrus juice would actually taste like.)

If we add up all of our various category rankings into a single metric, we arrive at the Birmingham Bowl between 6-6 Georgia Southern and 5-7 Appalachian State as the silliest bowl of the season, followed closely by our by-now-beloved Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl presented by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop with Miami of Ohio and Fresno State, and the oldie-but-goodie favorite of absurd bowls, the Gasparilla Bowl with Memphis versus NC State in third place.

All of these bowls ought to at least have something to offer, so click around on the chart above to sort by different categories that might mean more to you personally. And however you choose to consume them, enjoy the bowl season. Because, if it’s wrong to spend a late-December afternoon watching two deeply mediocre teams play silly football while you park on the couch and eat candy, then frankly, I don’t want to be right.

Filed under: College Football, Football