You could have bowled me over with a Poulan Weed Eater when I realized that I had already missed as many as 10 bowl games. The parade of epic struggles will continue well into the New Year, grabbing the attention of a handful of people beyond friends, relatives and alumni of the concerned teams. Yes, it is the season of the bowl games, and several things have caught my attention.

First, there seem to be more of these games, though I can’t be certain because who could possibly know this sort of thing or retain this information from year to year? The answer of course is “Google.” Turns out there are actually four new bowls this year — and no doubt more lurking just over the horizon.

Second, of the games played thus far that I have had the pleasure of watching for as long as 30 seconds, there are an inordinate number of fans wearing the now famous “empty seat disguise.” These are mainly seen at bowls whose pay out per team is so small that the teams playing in them lose money.

Of course, some teams can lose millions even at the major bowls by spending millions to take everyone within earshot of the university on chartered planes to wherever on the planet the games are played. I believe Wisconsin holds the NCAA record for the worst debt-to-pay-out ratio.

Another thing I have noticed is the high number of players who will not be making the trip to the big game. The consensus national champion in this regard is Florida State University, which I am proud to say is one of my several alma maters. More about them in a moment.

A short perusal of Googleland reveals that 36 players from 13 universities would not be participating in these educational excursions. The major reason for the ineligibility is academic, with arrests playing a role in a few cases, thus demonstrating that student athletes outnumber criminal athletes.

More instructive is that the search revealed several cases in which columnists and bloggers expressed surprise and delight when it was revealed that no one was eliminated from their home team for academic reasons.

Arkansas met the good news about Hog eligibility with relief. Interim coach Reggie Herring was particularly pleased, calling this a great achievement. Herring also pointed out that his best player had to deal with many distractions attending awards dinners around the country, while finishing the term and staying eligible. In many places, maintaining eligibility itself can be a major distraction.

At times the need to maintain eligibility can lead to practices that ultimately produce more ineligibility, if and when academic fraud is discovered. Florida State University will lead the nation this year with 34 players ruled ineligible for the Music City Bowl, about 25 of them being implicated in an academic fraud scandal.

In September, Florida State announced that it had uncovered cases of academic fraud in the athletic program and initiated a full-scale internal investigation. As that process proceeded, the scope of the scandal grew. Last week that investigation revealed major problems with an online music history course. A “learning specialist” (not to be confused with a student athlete) and a tutor in the athletic academic support system (an oxymoron wrapped in a paradox producing a conundrum) were implicated in the scandal. The online course apparently did not employ the routine security precautions that these courses normally have.

Reacting to the announcement, the Venerable Bobby, of the Football Clan of Bowden, had this to say: “I ain’t never run from a fight, and I ain’t gonna run from this one, I guarantee you.” The head coach was immediately assigned a learning specialist from the FSU English Department.

More lucid but just as disingenuous, FSU President T.K. Wetherell said that no athletes had enrolled in this course with any intention of doing anything wrong. This may fool a gullible public, but anyone who has ever registered for classes on a college campus knows better.

There are courses to enroll in if you need some performance enhancement for your G.P.A., and that is true for athletes and non-athletes alike. My guess is that if this course has been functioning without security for more than a semester, students from all around the campus were flocking to enroll in it and pick up some of that “easy listening” credit.

It certainly made me proud to hold a degree from such an institution as FSU, where priorities are in order and academic scandals on this scale only take place every 20 years or so. Non-academic scandals seem to come more frequently. Even worse is that in the midst of this scandal, FSU had one of its worst years on the football field in several decades. It is sad, but the Venerable Bobby couldn’t even make crime pay.

The only good news came out of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, which reported that the academic performance of players in this year’s bowl games has improved over last year in both graduation rates (up 2 percent) and progress toward graduation (up 10 percent). Unfortunately the news was not all positive. There is a considerable gap that exists in these rates between white and African-American players. Twenty-seven teams (42 percent of the bowl teams) graduated less than half of their African-American players.

In simpler times this would have been termed “exploitation.”