College football bowl games season has arrived and 2023 offers up some of the dumbest names yet for the December tradition.
Starting on Dec. 16, the college football bowl games schedule will roll out with a slate of seven games. However, many fans of the college ranks will be looking ahead to Dec. 30 and New Year’s Day for several fascinating matchups between ranked teams and the first games in the 2023 college football playoffs.
Many of the bowl games that come before the playoffs don’t get much attention because quite a few of them are seen as pointless matchups between teams that struggled during their regular season campaigns. In the end, the matchups are nonetheless used as platforms to advertise various brands and products.
And along with that advertising comes some awful names for those bowl games. With that in mind, let’s run down the 10 dumbest names for college football bowl games this month.
10 dumbest names for 2023 college football bowl games
Avocados From Mexico Cure Bowl
Who doesn’t love avocados? They are a superfood and an absolutely delicious addition to many meals in Mexican cuisine. Cure’s are also very good. They have expanded the life span for human beings by almost 20 years since the 1930s. But in the end, they don’t make much sense together in a bowl game name.
The Avocados From Mexico Cure Bowl will feature a nice matchup between Miami of Ohio and Appalachian State and the pairing is a treat for football fans. But the name is a strange mashup even for folks that love the ‘cado.
Famous Toastery Bowl
In the current era of college football bowl games, many of the matchups aren’t long-running yearly games that get a sponsor’s name slapped in front of them. Quite a few are now a whole game based around a product. One example of this is the Famous Toastery Bowl featuring Western Kentucky and Old Dominion.
Famous Toastery is an American cuisine food chain located in the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland. So many football fans have never even heard of it and that’s exactly why it’s a pretty dumb bowl name.
RoofClaim.com Boca Raton Bowl
It’s bad enough to have a weird product as the sponsor or a small city in Florida in the name of a bowl game, but South Florida and Syracuse will be competing in a matchup with both in the logo. Because the two East Coast teams are the participants in the RoofClaim.com Boca Raton Bowl.
The Boca Raton-based company is being clever by trying to find college football fans who need their roofs replaced in the new year, but Boca and roof replacing should not be a representation of the sport.
Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl
Union Home Mortgage serving as a bowl game sponsor doesn’t sound sexy but it does fit the trend of many bowl names these days. However, Tampa Bay leaning into their buccaneer past with the matchup between Georgia Tech and UCF being named after pirate Jose Gaspar and his ship the Gasparilla is a level of cosplay silly that easily makes it one of the dumbest college football bowl game names in 2023.
Guaranteed Rate Bowl
Everybody needs good rates for mortgages and loans. Even college football fans. However, they don’t need an entire bowl game named after lending company Guaranteed Rate. Especially when they are unlikely to give every fans in attendance a guaranteed rate on a loan — if they need it — on the way out.
Wasabi Fenway Bowl
With college football bowl game sponsors being so wide open a pair of legendary MLB franchises have gotten involved in the festivities in recent years. One of those organizations is the Boston Red Sox and in 2023, they will present the Wasabi Fenway Bowl. Because nothing says Boston like wasabi.
While you may be able to link wasabi to Fenway Park’s iconic green monster, because the Japanese addition to sushi can be a green beast on the tastebuds, this game’s name is still one of the dumbest in 2023.
Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl
The other MLB team taking part in bowl season is the New York Yankees. This year’s Pinstripe Bowl will be presented by Bad Boy Mowers. Firstly, if you’ve been to the area of the Bronx where Yankees Stadium is located, there aren’t many places where mowers will be used. Although there are certainly many bad boys.
However, the legendary Yankees brand and many of their players over the last 25 years haven’t really been what you would consider bad boys –unless you hate PEDs. That is why this year’s name is a very odd pairing and lands on this list of the dumbest names for a bowl game in 2023.
Camellia Bowl
The college football audience is mostly male, and that is why the Camellia Bowl is one of the oddest and dumbest bowl game names around. The camellia is the Alabama state flower and an unusual source of a bowl name. Dudes eating pizza, chugging beers, belching, and watching a college football game named after a flower is a classic slice of bowl name strangeness and it’s pretty dumb.
Duke’s Mayo Bowl
While I am a big fan of mayo, there are many people out there — including my wife — who hate the classic spread. Having an entire bowl game named after Duke’s Mayo — no matter how good it may be — is a weird and money-driven choice.
Beyond it being a dumb name for the game, North Carolina star Drake Maye isn’t even wasting his time by taking part and is already focused on preparing for the 2024 NFL Draft.
Related: College football conference championship games could soon be a thing of the past
Pop-Tarts Bowl
Pop-Tarts are great, and many of the Arizona and Oklahoma players competing in the game, who don’t have NIL deals, probably eat them often. They are one of the few pastries that are both delicious straight out of the box or toasted.
However, the Pop-Tarts Bowl would be a better fit for a game between high school players or cartoon characters, not for a college football bowl game between a pair of top 15 teams. That’s dumb.