Preoccupied With 1985

Okay. Time to get personal for a second. If you've read my posted thoughts for any extended period of time, you've probably picked up that I'm a Kansas City sports guy. With that location being my hometown, I grew up with a healthy fondness for crowns, arrowheads, and the like. That fondness continues to this day, so please excuse my excitement for baseball at the moment.

On Tuesday night, the Kansas City Royals make their first postseason appearance in (basically) 29 years. It means that in the Heartland, a generation of fans will experience their first taste of October(-ish) baseball. I understand that it's a wild card game that didn't exist three years ago. I also understand that all the happy-go-lucky feelings could end by midnight. For some, it indicates a watered-down version of the playoff series to follow. But has the hardball postseason seen an expansion on the level of ... let's say, college football?

Over the last 29 years, the sport that appears to exhibit more pride than any other has gone through a few changes. First, zone in on the postseason structure. As we all know, this winter will bring in the first-ever bracketed playoff at the highest level of the collegiate game. Sure, the process to select which teams get to participate is, at least, a little arbitrary. But the first squads to be looked at will have a conference title in their possession.

For the folks not worthy of one of the four selections, they still have an opportunity to be in a showcase that sets this game apart from mostly everything else. The bowl tradition is as strong as any in all of sport. From SoCal to South Beach, these exhibitions have guaranteed a sense of accomplishment for more teams than the one that will be the ultimate champion. In fact, more and more get to celebrate every season. Just after the Royals won their only World Series in 1985, 18 bowl games were played. As KC returns to the playoffs, that bowl number has ballooned to 35 (in 2013 ... 39 are slated for 2014).

Expansion has been big for all sports since the mid-'80s, but probably no bigger than in baseball and college football. For MLB, it wasn't quality (only four franchises have been created) as much as impact. These organizations paved the way for three divisions in each league and, ultimately, the creation of the wild card. If you're a sports fan, you already know how expanding the FBS level of football has effected the sectioning of it. Conference realignment has slowed down, but is still continuing to this day. The jump from 105 programs (1985) to 128 (this season) also slightly explains the explosion of bowl games.

I promise there's a point to all of this.

While deciding what to touch on for this column, the idea came up to tie the Royals' decades of struggle to the college football programs which have been mired in their own bowl game droughts. Even with as many as 70 teams being invited each season, I thought there might be a few that just haven't put everything together for that magical run. Four programs (UMass, South Alabama, Texas State, and Texas-San Antonio) haven't been to a bowl yet, but they all just arrived at the FBS level and couldn't participate until a year or two ago.

Eastern Michigan fits the profile. The Eagles made their one, and only, bowl appearance in the 1987 California Bowl. Since that 30-27 victory over San Jose State, the program has experienced only three winning seasons (with one 6-6 record shuffled in, too). However, there is one school that has gone through more desert than the hapless Royals will walk out of on Tuesday night.

New Mexico State has seen some success, however spotty, in the annals of the sport. The Aggies started on a positive note right out of the gate in 1931 (6-4). They held some of that momentum through most of the 1930s. A lot of lean years in the '40s and '50s gave way to an perfect campaign in 1960, a Sun Bowl win, and an Associated Press ranking as high as No. 14. The rest of that decade had some good seasons, as well. Once 1970 hit, though, the tables turned. The Aggies have managed to finish with only four winning records in 44 years. Even as late as 2002, seven wins weren't enough for NMSU to land a spot in a postseason game. This means that 1960 Sun Bowl was the last time Las Cruces has seen their program make it to any bowl.

This year, the team has shown some progress. With a little better result against in-state rival New Mexico, the Aggies would be halfway to breaking that long, bowl-less streak. As it stands, they're 2-3 with the remainder of the Sun Belt schedule in front of them (they already won at Georgia State). You would think that if NMSU could get to seven wins, it would be enough to provide a top-three finish in-conference and a possible invitation. So, from here on out, I'll root for some positive mojo to come out of New Mexico's second-largest city. While I'm not the biggest fan of bowl season, it does some good once in a while.