Don’t listen to the naysayers. Give the bowl season a chance.

You know me. I still think it’s the most glorious time of the year, full of holiday cheer, beginning with the Myrtle Beach Bowl, which sounds like it ought to be a Putt-Putt tournament but is instead the long-awaited grudge match between Georgia Southern and Ohio.

If you’re not excited about that — after all, it’s been a full week since Army-Navy — then you can’t really call yourself a college football fan.

That goings-on in Myrtle Beach is the first of six bowls kicking off Saturday alone, and not a moment too soon. Six of them! Put new batteries in the remote clicker thingie.

Some will scoff at, say, the Famous Toastery Bowl or roll their eyes at the Camellia Bowl. It’s the snob’s take. Believe me, they’ll be walking around in a glazy-eyed daze until the playoffs start. Just ignore them. They know not what they do.

So let this be my annual reminder that every “meaningless” bowl game is a good 3-4 hours during this ‘tis season that you won’t be tempted to — accidentally or not — channel-surf slap dab into the middle of an NBA game.

Run, don’t walk, from that terror. But find you a good couch perch for the Union Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl.

You’ll thank me later.

Yet, despite the public service rendered, not to mention the swag bags provided the participants, somehow the bowls still get a bad rap, particularly those near the bottom of the food chain.

And it’s gotten worse in recent years, escalating apace since the player opt-outs became fashionable and transfer-portal-hopping became legal.

Yes, it can be tough figuring out who’s in and who’s out these days. But, face it, particularly in these early bowls from the nether reaches, you’ve never heard of any of these players anyway.

It’s not a concern for the playoff games, of course. You can expect everybody of any importance to be present and accounted for.

The other bigger brand names tend to play later in the holidays, too.

So maybe the biggest question mark heading in is whether LSU will have its Heisman Trophy winner for the New Year’s Day ReliaQuest Bowl showdown with Wisconsin, which will be missing its leading rusher.

It’s probably 50-50 whether Jayden Daniels makes an appearance with the Tigers in Tampa. Maybe he really hasn’t made up his mind yet. Just a guess, but if he was playing, I think we’d have heard something official by now.

So stay tuned. If not, then it’s not the end of the world.

The portal junkies are doing what they feel they have to do, possibly tempted by Name, Image and Likeness riches.

When it comes to the opt-outs, I’ve still never figured out the theory of “preparing for the NFL draft” by temporarily quitting football. But that’s the way it so often works and history shows the pros don’t hold it against them.

Still, it does confuse things for the bowl season — and don’t forget all the interim coaches involved.

LSU, for instance, has been on both sides of it for the last two bowl trips. Two seasons ago the Tigers basically took a JV team with an interim coach to the TaxAct Texas Bowl in Houston — the 42-20 loss to a relatively intact Kansas State team was fairly predictable. Las year it was Purdue trying to scrape up a starting 11 for the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl in Orlando and the Tigers had themselves a very Happy New Year while showing off in a 63-7 romp.

The two games were little consolation for the losing teams.

But maybe fans are looking at these bowls, the depleted ones anyway, the wrong way.

When teams show up as a shell of their regular-season persona, maybe their fan bases should be looking at it not as a reward for a season just finished, but as a good preview to the next year.

At least it goes down as a real game, meaningless or not. It sure beats trying to rely on the (truly meaningless) spring game as an indicator.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com