In the beginning, there was the new Yankee Stadium, and we did not care because it was a baseball stadium. Then Notre Dame and Army got on board, followed by many more Northeastern schools, and rumors surfaced of a possible bowl game at the new site. This got us really excited, because if there's one thing this country needs to get America back on track it's further exposure to Notre Dame, the Yankees and third-tier bowl games.

Finally, the neglected sports fans of New York are getting the obscure postseason college football game they never dreamed of -- and the home team's even throwing in the naming rights:

Nick Carparelli Jr., the Big East’s associate commissioner for football, said in a telephone interview on Monday that talks for the Yankee Bowl have been progressing. The bowl would be an annual game most likely played between Christmas and New Year’s that would allow traveling fans to experience New York during that time of year.

The bowl would involve a team from the Big East, most likely its third- or fourth-place team, and the seventh-place team from the Big 12.

Because if it wasn't called the Yankee Bowl, how would we know it was being played in Yankee Stadium? Couldn't they have gone all the way and made it the Steinbrenner Bowl?

We're sure this is a beautiful venue, given the money poured into it, and we're all for football games staged in grand settings, but two things stop us from cheering this development: First, it's an outdoor game in New York in the dead of winter, the type of locale that typically has trouble filling seats for a postseason match and has killed previous bowl games in the Big Apple with more attractive match-ups. (Although this is where the idea strikes us as sort of accidentally brilliant; the marketing hordes sure to be employed to publicize this thing are going to have more resources at their disposal than, say, the Pizza Pizza Bowl drones.) Second ... the third-place team from the Big East and the seventh-place team from the Big 12 are rewarded with a trip to New York at Christmas? Really? Shipping them to half-empty stadiums in Birmingham or Boise is one thing, but no 6-6 also-ran deserves to set foot on Broadway.

If this insistence on adding more and more games continues, fine, but we can still raise the bar for entry; let's cut some of the dead weight while we're at it (looking at you, Shreveport) and make the postseason something special again.