Who provides Chicago football fans with their cheap thrills for the season?

Fans of the gridiron are having their share of potential thrills, along with disappointments, now that we’re at the time of year in which the bowl games are being played.

Will the Chicago Bears still be relevant when the Super Bowl comes to Atlanta?

We’ll have to see just how the Chicago Bears fare – with some fans being delusional enough to think this is the year of a Super Bowl championship.

OF COURSE, THIS could just as easily be the year the Bears get knocked out of the playoffs in the first round when they take on the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday.

In which case, this could easily turn out to be the season where all of the big-time football teams managed to fall short.

After all, Notre Dame is the team that lost only one game this season and qualified for the Cotton Bowl – which theoretically could have put them in contention for the national title for college football.

But the Fighting Irish managed to get walloped in that game against Clemson – thereby reinforcing the attitude felt amongst many that Notre Dame’s days of being a college football power are all long in the past.

IF THE BEARS manage to get knocked out early in the playoff rounds, the disappointment would be comparable to that of Notre Dame.

Sad sack of Chicago-area football; or can we just write them off as Hoosiers?

Which is where Northwestern University comes in. The suburban Evanston-based school that likes to market itself as “Chicago’s Big 10 Team” fell short of winning the Big 10 conference title – losing to Ohio State, which on Tuesday won the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. But they did get one of the lesser bowl games, and managed to win.

A 31-20 victory over Utah in the Holiday Bowl – which means the Wildcats got a trip to San Diego. While we got soggy wet on New Year’s Eve, they got California sunshine just as they would have if they had managed to prevail against the Buckeyes in Indianapolis.

Was the one-time Dyche Stadium the place where most interesting football of 2018 was played?

It could turn out to be the highlight of Chicago-area football for the season – unless the Bears truly are capable of going on a winning streak to take them all the way to a Super Bowl victory in Atlanta on Feb. 3 – which could show that the 12-4 record they achieved this year wasn’t a complete fluke and that the only fluke of the year may well have been Notre Dame.

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