It's Time to Die for the Motor City Bowl

The Motor City Bowl is no more. However, and unfortunately for Big Ten teams hovering around 6-6, this just means the thing is changing its name. I'm sure someone will post about how this is a metaphor for Detroit's implosion or something, except it's not a metaphor it's what's actually happening:

George Perles, the co-founder and CEO of the Motor City Bowl, told WWJ Lansing Bureau Chief Tim Skubick Monday the title of the game will be changed because of the troubles in the auto industry.

"We're gonna be probably known as the Little Caesar's Pizza, Pizza Bowl," Perles joked adding the automakers "have been good to the Motor City Bowl for 13 years."

Ha ha ha ha, Perles you card! No one would actually name a bowl game something so undignif—

Motor City Bowl CEO and former Michigan State coach George Perles says he and Ken Hoffman, the bowl's executive director, recently approached the chain about renaming the game the Little Caesars Pizza Pizza Bowl. The title would incorporate Little Caesars' advertising tagline.

And by "no one" I mean "everyone always, let's just call the Grandaddy the FTD.com Bowl." Not only was Perles not joking, it was his idea in the first place.

Surely this represents a new low. When a newspaper reporter takes your deadpan statement about what the thing is going to be called and cannot compute it as anything other than a lame attempt at humor, this is another step on the path to Blade Runner. Actually, given Wikipedia's take on the "Blade Runner curse" …

Among the folklore that has grown up around the film over the years has been the belief that the film was a curse to the companies whose logos were displayed prominently as product placements in some scenes.[89] While they were market leaders at the time, many of them experienced disastrous setbacks over the next decade and hardly exist today. RCA, which at one time was the U.S. leading consumer electronics and communications conglomerate, was bought out by one time parent GE in 1985, and dismantled. Atari, which dominated the home video game market when the film came out, never recovered from the next year's downturn in the industry, and by the 1990s had ceased to exist as anything more than a brand, a back catalog of games and some legacy computers. [six or seven further examples]

… maybe we're already there. Who sponsored the Rose Bowl last year? Citibank. Corporate bowl games are responsible for the financial implosion. QED.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.