Grading Bowl Swag! Orange Bowl Edition

‘Tis the season of swag.

In keeping with tradition, B5Q’s mother site SB Nation published its annual review of the best and not-so-best bowl game gifts for players on Tuesday.

I love bowl swag announcement day. It’s up there with the announcements of the games, and slightly ahead of the actual games themselves in my favorite part of the bowl season.

Let’s take a look at this year’s Orange Bowl haul, bestowed upon the Badgers in their first postseason trip to Miami. Here are the unit grades:

Tourneau Watch (B-)

What is an event without a shapely timepiece to commemorate it by? Tourneau has been supplying the Orange Bowl with eminently sellable watches for the past few years. Want a bowl watch of your own? You’ve got almost 30 choices available now on Ebay!

LYFE Brand Hat (A-)

Miami sports and streetwear designer LYFE Brand is kicking in a hat. Neat. As a power bald, I appreciate a quality hat.

Ice Shaker Water Bottle and Shaker Cup (A)

Ice Shaker is A water bottle and protein shaker company owned by a Gronk brother featured on Shark Tank. I am 200 percent on board for this and have updated my Christmas list accordingly.

Gift Suite (A++++)

The gift suite is the “open this last” of bowl swag. For the uninitiated, each bowl bestows upon attendees a bevvy of gifts, all with a sufficiently “the NCAA is super-dumb” artificial limit of $550 per person. Morgan Moriarty breaks it down pretty well in the SB Nation piece, but sufficed to say, it’s as random as one would expect from the world’s most hilarious “amateur” organization this side of the IOC.

Basically, bowls present to attendees a cornucopia of swag that they can “buy” using a point system. In the past, these have ranged from headphones (two points) to recliners and big-screen TVs (eight points) to a Ford F250 Super-Duty (eleventy-hundred points ... OK, maybe not). It’s a way to introduce choice and variety into the system and the bowls are even nice enough to ship the choices so that 80 or so twenty-somethings don’t have to check their recliners onto the team plane.

OK, commentariat. What would be your dream bowl swag package?