Notre Dame is not a good football team, but bowl games aren’t about putting the best teams on the field.

No, bowl games are about selling tickets and attracting TV viewers, which is why Notre Dame may play in the Cotton, Gator or Sun bowl — bowls that are usually reserved for teams with records better than 7-5, which is what Notre Dame will likely be when the year is over. Neither the Cotton Bowl nor the Gator Bowl has ever had a five-loss team, but Cotton Bowl president Rick Baker said that doesn’t matter.

“I don’t think we necessarily look just at the records,” Baker said. “We’re going to look at the matchup and the history that we have with the programs that we’re considering. That’s not a policy that we don’t take a 7-5 team, that’s just the way that it’s happened.”

Sorry, but that’s ridiculous. Of course the bowls look at the teams’ records. It’s just that Notre Dame is a big enough draw that the Cotton Bowl is willing to give the Fighting Irish a bid despite their sub-par record.

Of course, there is a down side to Notre Dame getting better bowl bids than it deserves: The Fighting Irish have lost an NCAA-record nine straight bowl games. This year it’s likely to become 10 in a row.

We suggested a few days ago that Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis could be on the hot seat, and now Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick is trying to quell such speculation.

Swarbrick told Joe Schad of ESPN that no evaluation of Weis would take place until after the season, and a coaching change is “not under consideration at this time.”

His use of the phrase “at this time” is interesting. Is he suggesting that it could be under consideration at a future time?

“It’s really dangerous to evaluate mid-year,” Swarbrick said, “but clearly we are better this year than we were last year. Look at the Colts of the NFL. The year they won the Super Bowl, they had lost to Jacksonville and everyone had written them off. Then look at the New York Giants. There are dangers in midseason evaluation.”

I’m not sure I buy that comparison, and I’m not sure that Weis’s record (5-4 this season and 27-19 overall in four seasons) is good enough to merit keeping his job. But what I am sure about is that Weis signed such a huge contract with Notre Dame that it would take something catastrophic — like getting blown out the next three Saturdays by Navy, Syracuse and USC — for Notre Dame to even consider buying him out.

Weis reportedly has seven years left on his contract at $3 million to $4 million a year. Realistically, he’s got to get at least one more year of that salary.

Nothing symbolized the mess that Charlie Weis’s Notre Dame program became last year like the Fighting Irish’s loss to Navy. That game dropped Notre Dame to 1-8 on the season and snapped a 43-game winning streak over the Midshipmen.

Notre Dame is a better team this year than last year. Bu as I watched the Fighting Irish lose to Boston College Saturday night, I wondered if they’re going to lose to Navy again on Saturday.

The 17-0 loss to Boston College, in which Jimmy Clausen threw four interceptions, was reminiscent of the completely incompetent team the Fighting Irish fielded last season. Inaccurate passing from Boston College quarterback Chris Crane was the only thing that prevented the game from turning into a complete blowout. So is this Notre Dame team bad enough to lose to Navy again?

I think so. Navy is a decent team this season, with a 6-3 record and a triple-option offense that’s hard to stop. Notre Dame will be favored, but not by a lot.

And if Navy beats the Irish, could Weis’s job be in jeopardy? He seems to know it could, based on his comments after the Boston College game.

”I’m the head coach,” Weis said. ”Ultimately, criticism always comes this way. I’m the boss.”

With a loss to Navy, he might not be the boss much longer.

At the outset of overtime in today’s Pittsburgh-Notre Dame game, Notre Dame won the coin toss, and in the process we learned that the Fighting Irish captain doesn’t understand how college football overtime works.

The team that wins the toss in college football overtime always chooses to go on defense first because of the advantage of knowing what your offense needs to do to win. But Notre Dame’s captain apparently doesn’t know that.

After Notre Dame won the toss, the ref turned to the Notre Dame captain and said, “You want to go on defense, correct?”

The captain replied, “We want to defer.”

The ref looked confused for a moment before saying, “You can’t defer.”

Eventually, it was explained to the Fighting Irish that they wanted to go on defense, and that’s what they chose to do.

And then things got even stranger. After the first play of overtime, the game had to be delayed because the sprinklers started watering the Notre Dame Stadium field. It took a couple of minutes — apparently there’s more to turning off the sprinklers than just turning a knob — but eventually the water got shut off and overtime finally resumed.

Note: When the second overtime period was played in the area where the sprinklers had been watering the field, the NBC announcers made a big deal out of how unsafe it was that they were playing on wet grass. Uh, guys? Are you aware that football games aren’t canceled when it rains?

UPDATE: Pittsburgh won 36-33 in four overtimes, with the overtimes resembling World Cup penalty kicks: Neither team could get into the end zone, so they just traded field goals until the fourth overtime, when Notre Dame’s kicker missed and Pittsburgh’s kicker made it.

Lost in all of Saturday’s college football action was this score: Navy 34, SMU 7.

And that score would deserve to get lost, as simply a mediocre team blowing out a terrible team, except that when you look at the box score, you see something shocking: Navy didn’t throw a pass. The Midshipmen finished the game with 77 carries for 404 yards on the ground, and 0-for-0 passing.

The weather was terrible, and Navy was down to its third-string quarterback, Ricky Dobbs, and Dobbs ran the option so well that coach Ken Niumatalolo figured he’d just keep the game on the ground. Dobbs finished the game with an absurd 42 carries for 224 yards and four touchdowns.

Navy has almost always been a run-oriented team, but Saturday is believed to be the first time the Midshipmen went through a game without throwing a single pass in the 60 years or so that they’ve been keeping statistics. The last Division I-A college football team to play a game without throwing a pass was Ohio University in a 21-17 win over Akron exactly 11 years earlier, on October 25, 1997.

As for SMU, coach June Jones’ offense was just slightly less effective on the ground than Navy, finishing the game with 11 rushes for minus-13 yards.

“It’s just frustrating,” Jones said. “You have to be able to overcome the conditions. We weren’t able to today.”

The Army-Navy game has become much less relevant in recent years, thanks largely to the fact that conference championship games have overshadowed it.

Now the military academies have found a way to change that: Starting in 2009, Army and Navy are moving their game back until the second Saturday of December so that it will come after the conference championship games and be the final college football game of the season. The game also will be streamed live for free on CBSSports.com, so troops around the world will be able to watch.

It’s a somewhat odd change to the college football calendar. For one thing, the college presidents are always saying the season can’t go into December because students need time to focus on final exams — and yet West Point and Annapolis, which have some of the highest academic standards in all of Division I football, don’t seem to think that’s the case. There’s also the fact that if Army or Navy go to a bowl game, they’ll probably only have a couple of weeks off beforehand.

But overall, I like it. Army-Navy shouldn’t get lost on the college football calendar. Starting next year, it won’t.

The officials on the field and in the replay booth did an absolutely disgraceful job at the end of today’s Notre Dame-North Carolina game.

First, a North Carolina completion that would have sealed the game on third-and-3 late in the fourth quarter was overturned on flimsy visual evidence, and after a delay that lasted far too long. Whether the play should have been ruled a completion on the field or not was debatable, but it’s indisputable that once the play was ruled that way, there was no reason to overturn it by replay — and no reason to take five minutes to come to that decision.

And after that bad decision came an even worse decision. With just seconds remaining in the game, Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen completed a pass to Michael Floyd for 24 yards, but Floyd fumbled, North Carolina recovered, and that should have been the end of the game.

But the officials on the field ruled that Floyd hadn’t fumbled, and that there was one second left. So then Clausen got Notre Dame to the line of scrimmage and spiked the ball. Unfortunately for Clausen, the time he took to spike the ball took the last second off the clock. So North Carolina wins, right?

Wrong. After the spike, the ref turned on his microphone to tell us he was reviewing the previous play — not the spike, but the completion and fumble. Even though the rules specifically prohibit reviewing a play once another play has been run.

After a delay of about six minutes (I can’t imagine what took so long), the ref ruled, correctly, that it was a fumble and that North Carolina recovered.

So North Carolina won and deserved to win, and since the team that deserved to win did win, the botched officiating won’t be long remembered. But it’s long past time for the NCAA to find referees who can keep the game moving during replay reviews, and clearly explain to the fans what they’re reviewing. The way this referee handled the end of this game was a disgrace.

Notre Dame tight end Will Yeatman, who was cited for underage drinking last month, will be sentenced on previous misdemeanor drunk driving charges and could face jail time.

Yeatman was arrested for drunk driving early this year but had worked out a deal in which those charges would be dropped if he could stay out of trouble for a year. Now that he has failed to stay out of trouble, he faces sentencing.

Arrested with Yeatman was his Notre Dame teammate Mike Golic Jr., son of the former Eagles defensive lineman and current ESPN personality. Golic Jr. is a first-time offender and will be sentenced to a “voluntary diversion program.”

Yeatman is being benched on Saturdays because of the arrest but is still practicing with the team. Golic Jr. was expected to redshirt anyway.

On today’s installment of Mike and Mike in the Morning, Mike Golic addressed the underage drinking arrest over the weekend of his son, Mike Golic Jr.

Said Golic, “I have a son at Notre Dame, and we’ve talked a lot about that, and over the weekend he was at a house party, and there was alcohol at the house party and the police came and basically a whole lot of people went downtown is how that one played out and Mike was one of them. As it unfolds I certainly will talk more about it. Right now it’s right at the beginning of the process so I’m going to hold off on where it’s going to go, but as we talk about the show we’ve been very open about our families, so as this thing goes on I will address it as well again then.”

Golic’s on-air partner Mike Greenberg mentioned that many people had sent supportive e-mails, and Golic then said he was thankful for that and added, “Mike is fine, everything is going to be fine with it.”

Golic Jr., a freshman center who has not yet played in a game, was one of more than 40 people arrested early Sunday morning. Also arrested was tight end Will Yeatman, who has played in all three games for the Fighting Irish this season. It’s the second alcohol-related arrest for Yeatman this year; he also was arrested in January for driving drunk.

Notre Dame center Mike Golic Jr., the son of the co-host of ESPN’s Mike and Mike in the Morning, was among 41 people arrested on misdemeanor alcohol charges at 2 a.m. Sunday in South Bend.

Notre Dame tight end Will Yeatman was also arrested in the incident. Both were charged with being minors consuming alcohol. The arrests took place about seven hours after Notre Dame lost at Michigan State.

Although Golic is the better known of the two players because his father was a Notre Dame and Philadelphia Eagles defensive lineman and is now a TV and radio personality, it’s a much more serious issue for Yeatmen. In January Yeatman was arrested on a charge of driving drunk on a campus sidewalk; he later pleaded guilty to drunken driving and reckless driving.

Yeatman has played in all three games this season. Golic has not played a down.