Next Saturday, college football’s second season begins — the college bowl season.

It’s a college football junkie’s dream.

From Dec. 19 until the national championship game Jan. 11 in Glendale. Ariz., the airwaves will be full of college football as teams from different conferences (with the exception of the NOVA Home Loans Arizona Bowl in Tucson, Ariz., which features two Mountain West schools) square off in 41 different games for bragging rights over which conference or school plays the best football. In the case of the Orange and Cotton bowls, the combatants will be playing for something more serious — a chance to compete for the national title.

I’ve always enjoyed the college bowl season. It’s the time when I get my final fix of football for the year. When the national championship game is over, so is my time watching football, since I don’t watch the NFL and haven’t seen a Stupid Bowl in 20 years. I get to watch teams play that I never get the chance to see during the regular season, and some of the games get to be very interesting.

This second season is when I also put aside my prejudices against other SEC teams and root for the conference’s teams competing in the bowls. It means I (gulp, choke) cheer for Alabama and Ole Miss without being afraid of losing my status in the purple and gold Tiger Nation.

The one thing I find interesting about the bowl season is its growth every year. When I was growing up, there were six bowls, the Rose, Sun, Sugar, Cotton, Orange and Gator. They were all played on New Year’s Day and you played musical channels to watch them, switching stations during timeouts and halftimes to find the score of another game broadcast at the same time on another station.

The scene then changed with the Liberty and Independence bowls, and then the floodgates opened wide with new bowls being added at first every year and then every other year.

Bowls are traditionally supposed to be a reward for a team’s performance — a game in a warm, sunny spot like Florida or California and Texas (depending on the weather).

Now I wonder about the locations of some of these bowls. Many are still in Florida and one is in the Bahamas. But I find it hard to see the reward of playing in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl (formerly the Humanitarian Bowl) in Boise, Idaho. Who wants to play football in Idaho in mid-December? The same holds true for the Pinstripe Bowl in New York, even if you play in Yankee Stadium.

Nevertheless, the teams will play and I will watch one on TV, one on my smart phone with another game on my laptop.

After all, this is the end of the season and my last chance to soak in all the college football I can. I’ll cheer and pull for my Tigers in the Texas Bowl, and then pull for the other SEC teams, even if means at times I’ll lower my standards.