What’s that sound, you ask?

It’s college football gamblers, ESPN TV executives and non-power conference teams shouting with collective glee.

After expanding to what many old-timers consider to be a blasphemous 39 bowl games for the 2014 season, college football could add as many as three new games to the postseason slate this year. (The Cure Bowl, set for Orlando’s renovated Citrus Bowl in December 2015, will pit American Athletic Conference and Sun Belt Conference teams and already is official.)

In case you were wondering, including UAB in ’14, 84 FBS teams won six regular-season games to become bowl eligible. That would still leave two teams without a bowl game, as the College Football Playoff championship pits two teams who already have played in bowls.

In 2013, 82 schools earned bowl eligibility, just enough to fill the spots if college football allows the games in Tuscon, Ariz., and Little Rock, Ark. But in 2012, just 77 teams won six regular-season games.

Just 20 years ago, during the 1995 season, 18 bowl games existed. Even then, older generations of football fans groused about allowing every team to earn a participation trophy and how postseason play used to mean something.

Bowl games have become big business for ESPN, which televises all but one game — the Sun Bowl — on its family of networks. A subsidiary of ESPN called ESPN Events owns and operates 11 of the games, selling tickets and sponsorships and avoiding the overhead of paying an unaffiliated company for the TV rights.

Bowl attendance continues to decline, leading to some embarrassing crowd photos at some of the lesser games and hundreds of thousands in bills for teams that fail to sell their allotment of tickets. But even the inaugural Camellia Bowl in Montgomery, Ala., a game that drew just 20,256 fans, attracted an average TV audience of more than 1.1 million, according to ESPN.

Live sports on TV continues to drive relatively lucrative advertising revenue, and the games seem to attract no shortage of corporate sponsors, even with the Duck Dynasty folks recently pulling the plug on the Independence Bowl.

As a fan of college football and an occasional gambler, I enjoy the so-called “meaningless” bowl games on either side of Christmas each season. Once bowl season starts, there’s usually one game per day for several weeks, excluding Christmas and NFL game days. But the sport surely will get some blowback if it approves the new games, especially if college football is forced to start selecting 5-7 teams to fill the spots.