Home Contests Worthy of a Bowl-Game Name

The college football Bowl games are upon us. And despite their significantly diminished importance in the College Football Playoff era, they continue to garner lots of attention. This is surely due in no small part to their silly sounding names and sponsorships.

Names like the Sports Bowl, Pop-Tarts Bowl, Xbox Bowl, and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl demonstrate these are clearly marketing ploys and also that we give marketers more credit for cleverness than we should. But this isn’t a column about football or marketing. 

The Bowl games got me thinking about the silly face-offs I’ve encountered or regularly encounter in our house. Here are some of the contests that sound like bowl games even if no one else will ever watch them. Kind of like the Bahamas Bowl.

The Dueling Pianos Bowl - We have a piano and a keyboard in our house. This contest begins when the younger boy on the keyboard turns it up all the way in an attempt to drown out the real piano one of the older boys is practicing on. In football, a loud stadium is an advantage for the home team. In this case, the loud home environment is a major disadvantage to everyone not playing the piano. 

The Kiddie Swing Bowl – A showdown in the backyard where the youngest kids fight over who got to the swing first. This one is complicated by the 2-year-old who will drop whatever she’s doing and pretend she was going to swing if she sees a brother going to the swing set. She then adamantly claims the brother stole the swing from her and appeals to the referees (Mom and Dad) for a ruling. If she had two challenge flags she’d use them both in five minutes.

The Toilet Bowl - A face off over who has to clean up the drips on the seat. Lifting the seat would eliminate this bowl as a point of contention but that outcome is even less likely than Texas making it into the playoffs. Too soon?

The Frosting Bowl – Funnily enough, this one actually involves a real bowl. As soon as it’s known that Mom has baked something that involves chocolate or frosting there’s a jockeying for position to see who gets to lick the bowl.

The Lost Water Bottle Bowl – This one is a one-sided contest. And by one-sided I mean that it only involves one person. That person could be anyone (it’s the 5-year-old) and his opponent is his water bottle which has once again lost itself. Despite it almost always featuring the same teams and the same outcome, this one gets a lot of attention. Perhaps it’s because this one is on replay. Every. Single. Day.

The Underoos Bowl – There are a lot of good team chants out there. Hook ‘em, Roll Tide, Go Blue, etc. However none of them are fighting words like this phrase on laundry day: “He’s wearing my underwear!” Verbal responses range from, “I didn’t have any clean ones” to “well, these were in MY drawer” but this isn’t the kind of rivalry typically handled with words. “He’s wearing my underwear,” are fight’n words. This is the type of rivalry that makes Texas and Oklahoma look like buddies.