There’s Not Much to Be Bowled Over by This Football Season

In the afterglow, the first thought occurring is that when one team loses to another eight years in a row, do the two have a rivalry, or would you call it an incidental relationship?

Rivalry conjures up in one’s mind give-and-take, like Mike Tyson and his former wife. But when Notre Dame puts the boff on USC eight straight times, as it now has happened, one asks oneself if USC continues to be a rival?

The next question one poses concerns USC’s quarterback, Todd Marinovich, and whispers before the start of this season whether he would leap from freshman to the National Football League?

What he did was leap from freshman to sophomore, a prudent decision on his part, considering, indeed, he plays at the sophomore level. By that is meant, he does some things that are good and some things not at all good. He is a sophomore, whose next leap, it is hoped, will be to junior.

While he is still an undergraduate, it is hoped, too, he will come to understand that one in a game does not cuss out an official, as Mr. Marinovich did last Saturday.

The guy thought he was Roger Clemens.

Considering what happened to Clemens for cussing out an official, one would guess others pondering this course would conclude it is a losing proposition.

Next, we see the Notre Dame victory, however tight, over USC as an act of deliverance for the Federal Express Orange Bowl which, like other bowls, selected its principals long before it should have. The rules specified that teams this year could not be invited to bowl games before Nov. 24. People of impeccable honor, bowl promoters adhered to the rules.

All they did, three weeks ago, was ask schools if they would accept if the invitation were tendered, meaning you had what might be called deals out in the alley.

In boxing, deals are made in the alley all the time. Boxing lives in the alley, meaning that when our universities, society’s highest order, entered into the bowl deals that they did, they were taking up residence in boxing’s precinct.

Well, conniving to set up a national championship game in Miami, matching Notre Dame against Colorado, the Orange Bowl stood to suffer a major reversal if Notre Dame lost to USC, having lost the previous week to Penn State.

Already, the USF&G; Sugar Bowl looked stupid when Virginia, offered an invitation three weeks ago, got flattened by Virginia Tech, 38-13.

Filching Nebraska prematurely, the Florida Citrus Bowl wound up with a beauty just beaten, 45-10, by Oklahoma.

The Sunkist Fiesta Bowl got hit by lightning when Arizona voters rejected Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a holiday. Last observed, the Fiesta Bowl was trying to persuade the No. 2 team in the Southeastern Conference to meet Louisville, which one normally would link to an event going a mile and a quarter.

But Notre Dame’s coming from behind to trim USC, 10-6, probably gives the Orange Bowl the premier game in maybe the most embarrassing postseason known to college football.

Notre Dame frustrates a lot of its neighbors, never having been placed on probation by the NCAA, never even having been investigated. Is this what is meant as the luck of the Irish, or, indeed, is Notre Dame football as pure as newly fallen snow on a convent roof?

Others would swear the snow tends to drift, but if it does, the Irish never have been caught, which, of course, is the name of the game in college sports, as well as life.

With pardonable pride, though, Notre Dame reminds us that 98.6% of those players performing four years at South Bend earn a degree. We also are reminded that far fewer players move to pro from Notre Dame than do from USC, which leads the United States in producing NFL population.

USC shrugs. Pro football, it tells us, is a legal occupation. It’s the schools turning out financiers and politicians you want to worry about.