When the Rose Bowl is devalued, the system needs to be shut down

Once again we have a New Year’s Day matchup between the Pacific 10 and Big Ten conferences at the Rose Bowl, just the way everyone wanted it -- except for USC and Michigan.

If you needed another reason to demolish the Bowl Championship Series, here it is. We keep hearing from the college football folks that a playoff would diminish the rich history of the bowl games, but how exactly is that tradition being preserved when neither of these two old-school Rose Bowl participants truly wants to be there?

They both dreamed of playing Ohio State in the BCS’ so-called national championship game in Glendale, Ariz., on Jan. 8. That’s right, they’d rather head to the middle of the desert than the base of the picturesque San Gabriel Mountains. They’d rather be in a stadium that just opened instead of the great old oval built in 1922. So much for tradition.

In a conference call Sunday night featuring the two teams’ coaches and Rose Bowl Chief Executive Mitch Dorger, the only person whose happy talk didn’t require footnotes was Dorger.

“I know I’m really looking forward to being there on New Year’s Day,” he said. “We’re very excited about having these good friends back in the game.”

You can believe him, because if it were up to the Rose Bowl folks it would always be teams from the Big Ten and Pac-10, with nary a Cornhusker or Sooner in sight.

USC Coach Pete Carroll said playing in the Rose Bowl was a “fantastic opportunity,” and Michigan Coach Lloyd Carr said Michigan was “delighted” to accept the Rose Bowl bid.

But I didn’t see Carroll and the Trojans holding roses when they walked off the field following their loss to UCLA on Saturday. And when Carr was asked about his players’ reaction, he said, “There’s obviously disappointment. And yet part of life, and what they learned here, is that regardless of some of the things that don’t go your way in your life, you have to move on.”

In the case of this hard-luck tale, they did promise you a rose garden.

Instead of talking about the eighth Rose Bowl matchup between these college football powerhouses, most of the conference call consisted of Carr getting bombarded about his thoughts regarding the BCS system, the fairness of his team’s No. 3 ranking and whether coaches should vote. At one point Carroll, the taste of his team’s exclusion from the 2004 BCS title game still in his head, even expressed sympathy for Carr’s predicament.

That’s just another indication that this is a bad deal for the Rose Bowl.

Just to be clear, neither of these teams can blame their situation on the system. USC recused itself from the championship discussion with its second loss of the season on Saturday against UCLA. And Michigan has no right to step to the front of the contenders line because it didn’t satisfy what ought to be Requirement No. 1: Win your conference. So they both got what they deserved, if not what they wanted.

Do you really think the Trojans are eager to head back to that venue? Twice in the last 12 months their championship dreams have died on that field. I bet Michael Richards would opt to spend Christmas at the Wayans brothers’ house before USC would choose to go back to the Rose Bowl.

No one who cares about the Rose Bowl wants to see it turned into a consolation prize. It’s sad to think that this year’s Ohio State-Michigan game -- which was as hyped and exciting as any in the history of that great rivalry -- had the unprecedented stakes of the loser going to the Rose Bowl.

It wasn’t too long ago that the Rose Bowl meant everything to Big Ten teams. In 1992, for example, third-ranked Michigan was 8-0-1, and a victory in its final home game against Illinois would have kept the Wolverines in the national championship picture. But with the Wolverines trailing by three in the fourth quarter, Coach Gary Moeller decided to play for a tie that would clinch the Big Ten title. He called a run on third and long, then sent the field-goal unit out.

“I didn’t want to risk the Rose Bowl by throwing an interception,” Moeller said.

Those were the priorities: Rose Bowl first, a shot at the national championship second.

Then the BCS came into formation, with the Big Ten, Pac-10 and Rose Bowl signing on, and suddenly it became all about that crystal football.

That’s one reason that this will be a motivational challenge for Carroll. The last three years the Trojans have played for at least a share of the national championship. The best the Trojans can do now is to show they’re good enough to beat the team that came close to beating Ohio State.

“We’re going to make it a great game by getting ready and giving it all the respect it deserves,” Carroll said.

I want to see college football give the Rose Bowl the respect it deserves.

Yes, this year it played host to a classic matchup of the best two teams duking it out for the title until the final bell. And in 2004 the Trojans won a share of the national championship there, back when a USC-Michigan game really meant something. In recent years we’ve also seen an uncompetitive Miami-Nebraska “championship” game and a blah Oklahoma-Washington State matchup that featured rows of empty seats.

The occasional showcase every few years won’t cut it. We’re not talking about Martin Scorsese movies; the Rose Bowl is an annual event. And the folks at the Tournament of Roses committee do a great job putting it on. They shouldn’t be an afterthought in any year.

Have the Rose, Sugar, Orange and Fiesta bowls all hold games on New Year’s Day. Then use two of those stadiums for the semifinals the next week, and one more for a championship the week after that, on a rotating basis.

That wouldn’t guarantee the Rose Bowl would be the game every year. But with the winner at least assured of advancing to another round, the Rose Bowl would never be just a game.