Orange and Sugar Sweeten Up a Sour Day

Thank goodness for New Year’s Night football.

There were more massacres early on New Year’s Day than in “Godfather III.”

Going into the two night games, the winners had outscored the losers, 236-68.

But then along came the 10-9 Orange Bowl and the 23-22 Sugar Bowl to save the holiday for football fanatics. And you’d have to be a fanatic to have watched all eight games.

Rocket Ismail--who else?--provided the most exciting moment of the Orange Bowl, although his 91-yard punt return late in the game was nullified by a clipping penalty.

But NBC, in a hurry to sign off the air, never replayed the run in its entirety. Although, to its credit, NBC did have a replay of the obvious clipping penalty.

The Orange Bowl ended in time so viewers could switch over to catch the end of Tennessee’s exciting come-from-behind victory over Virginia.

It was a good finish to a day that, until nighttime, wasn’t very good for football viewing. The daytime hours were better spent getting together with neighbors, taking a long walk, going for a drive, washing the car or doing some yard work--anything but watching football.

It got so bad that at one point, as you might have seen, the Washington Husky mascot went to sleep on the sidelines at the Rose Bowl.

The tone for the daytime action was set by Michigan’s 35-3 rout of Mississippi in the Gator Bowl on ESPN. You had to be up by 8:30 a.m. to catch the start of this game, so you might have missed it. But you didn’t miss much.

The starting times for the Citrus Bowl on ABC and the Cotton Bowl on CBS were both listed at 10:30 a.m., but ABC got the jump, with Georgia Tech-Nebraska starting about 15 minutes before Miami-Texas.

ABC had to worry about making it to the Rose Bowl on time, but the Cotton Bowl was CBS’ only game of the day.

CBS had Jim Nantz and Tim Brant in the Cotton Bowl booth. One problem is they sound so much alike.

It won’t be a problem in the future, though. This was Brant’s last assignment for CBS. His contract wasn’t renewed because CBS lost its CFA package to ABC.

Brant won’t be missed much. He makes some decent points but too often gets carried away.

After Miami’s Outland Trophy winner Russell Maryland recorded one of his three sacks, Brant called him a Maryland pancake, which, he explained, was a takeoff on Maryland crab cake.

At least it sounded like Brant, who took it one step too far, adding, “A butt-buster is what he is.”

But Brant was right on a bit later when, after a personal foul on penalty-plagued Miami, he said, “Miami wanted to change its image all season long, but has destroyed it in one half of football.”

At halftime, CBS had a couple of mistakes in a season retrospective narrated by Andrea Joyce. Curtis Conway was called the latest in a long line of USC tailbacks. He’s a reserve flanker. And Trojan defensive back Jason Oliver was identified as Fred Harris. Both wear No. 43, but Harris is about a 10th-string defensive lineman who doesn’t play.

The only highlight of the second half at the Cotton Bowl was John Dockery’s sideline interview with the president of Mobil Oil. On second thought, that wasn’t much of a highlight, either.

The lowlight of the Citrus Bowl was all the hamming the Georgia Tech players did for the cameras. It would have classier to have done nothing at all and let the final score, 45-21, speak for itself.

Early in the Rose Bowl, ever-present sideline reporter Jack Arute, who also worked ABC’s parade coverage, interviewed former Washington quarterback Warren Moon on the sidelines.

When it went back to the booth, Keith Jackson said Moon went to Morningside High. That probably didn’t go over too well with people from Hamilton High, who include ABC colleague Al Michaels. Moon went to Hamilton.

Overall, Jackson and partner Bob Griese had a good telecast. Jackson slips up every once in a while, but if you took a poll asking viewers to name their favorite college football announcer, Jackson no doubt would be a landslide winner. He’s Mr. College Football.

Griese did something rather unusual in the first half, when Washington’s Charles Mincy intercepted a pass and returned it for a touchdown. Griese noticed the receiver, Iowa’s Danan Hughes, had to have changed his route and gone deep when he wasn’t supposed to.

The key, Griese noted, was that quarterback Matt Rodgers took only a three-step drop and the other receivers all ran short routes. To make his point, Griese asked director Larry Kamm in the truck to run back the film.

Griese, unlike John Madden, doesn’t have his own clicker.

“It felt like I was back in a coach’s room going over game films,” Griese said after the telecast.

Griese said he couldn’t recall doing anything quite like that before. “I just had to talk Larry through it,” he said.

It was something you’d expect on a Laker telecast, with Chick Hearn giving instructions to Susan Stratton, but not something you’d expect on a network Rose Bowl telecast. But the results were positive.

A highlight from the Fiesta Bowl was the “Celebrate America” halftime show, which singled out such notables as Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

But NBC cut away from this rather significant show for, among other things, O.J. Simpson interviewing Notre Dame players in their trashed hotel room and Bob Trumpy reporting that six Colorado players were trapped in an elevator for 20 minutes.

Then, with about five minutes left in the game, NBC switched to the Orange Bowl pregame show, which didn’t go over too well in Louisville, where the NBC affiliate was hit with about 30 or 40 calls.

People there wanted to see every second of the Cardinals’ 34-7 thrashing of Alabama.

The real thrills came later, and now what’s left is determining the national champion.

NBC seemed convinced it will be Colorado. Interviewer Bob Trumpy, questioning Colorado Coach Bill McCartney at the end of the Orange Bowl, opened by saying: “You wore down Notre Dame to win the national championship.”

If that wasn’t enough, the network also put up a graphic that read, “Colorado: National Champions.”

But if you watched the end of the Citrus Bowl on ABC, you were left thinking Georgia Tech had a legitimate shot at No. 1. No question ABC thinks so.

CBS, presumably, is neutral.