Morning Distribution for Wednesday, December 15, 2021

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Morning Distribution]( Wednesday, December 15, 2021 Your daily briefing from FiveThirtyEight --------------------------------------------------------------- The Morning Story [College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic – Clemson v Notre Dame]( [Can’t Decide Which Bowl Games To Watch? We’ve Got A Metric For That.]( By [Alex Kirshner]( As it has ballooned over the decades, college football’s bowl calendar has become a lot to sift through. In 1970, there were only [11 bowls](. In 2021, [there are 42]( in the Football Bowl Subdivision alone, not including the national championship game or the Celebration Bowl that crowns a Division I champ for historically Black colleges and universities. It all happens in December and early January, at times when lots of people are traveling or trying to spend time with loved ones. And it conflicts with busy stretches for the NFL and various other college and pro sports, plus all kinds of holiday TV specials. The playoff semifinals this year are on New Year’s Eve, when even some of the most committed college football fans won’t watch them. Time is of the essence. The ultimate determinant in whether you watch a bowl game this year may just be, “Are you on the couch with time to kill at the exact time a game is on?” If you are committed to watching every one of the nearly four dozen bowls, more power to you, but even among diehards, you are likely in the minority. If you prefer everything in moderation but still want to sample the best of the postseason, an alternative course is to plan ahead. Enter BEAST, the Bowl Enjoyment and Attractiveness System for Television. It’s a proprietary bowl watchability rating system developed in a lab (or at a kitchen table) by someone (me) who watches college football in bulk quantities for his profession (talking about college football). BEAST has four elements and blends fact and opinion; the maximum possible BEAST score is 15 (for the most watchable bowl), and the lowest is 4 (for the least). The components: [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: How Much Have Hispanic Voters Shifted Toward The GOP?]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.