All Bowled Over: College Football’s Picnic of Pastel

Memo to America: Try to plow through the glut of bowls from Shreveport to El Paso, from Tucson to Tampa, and, as the old song goes, from Memphis to Mobile. Come Jan. 1, it will all be worth the effort.

The pastel blazer crowd has conspired to deliver 23 postseason games, 18 bowls and five all-star contests. Do we need them? That’s a silly question. Television needs them, which means we’ve got them, whether we need them or not.

Included, of course, is the single most significant one--the New Year’s night Sugar Bowl on ABC matching No. 1 Miami and No. 2 Alabama with the national championship at stake. Two undefeated teams going at each other in the culmination of the season. That’s what a big bowl game is supposed to be all about.

What the bowls have become, however, is programming fodder for the networks. Ten games will be on ESPN, five on ABC, four on NBC, two on CBS, one on TBS and one independently pedaled by Raycom.

The bowl invitation is supposed to be special, a payoff for accomplishment, not mediocrity. How then do you explain a dozen teams who arrive with distinctly ordinary records, each with four losses or more?

Only four members of this dismal dozen are ranked, none higher than No. 21 Penn State (7-4), which had its Blockbuster berth sealed before the first pass was thrown in anger this season. All the Nittany Lions had to do was win the minimum six games, an assignment that turned out to be no simple matter for them.

The parade of games began Friday night with Nevada, one of the 7-4 powerhouses, playing 9-2 Bowling Green in the first Las Vegas Silver Bowl. Each lucky team got $150,000.

Three bowl teams--Utah in the Copper Bowl, Oregon in the Independence Bowl and Baylor in the John Hancock Bowl--come in sporting 6-5 records. Among them, they received no votes in the final Associated Press poll. This is not the best advertisement for the pastels.

Pat Tiller, executive director of the Independence Bowl, which has 7-4 Wake Forest against 6-5 Oregon, defends the also-ran games and the argument that they have also-ran teams.

“There are several teams out there who were qualified to go who are sitting at home,” she said. “Teams like Rutgers, Southern Mississippi and others. There are 18 games which means 36 spots. There are teams who wanted to go and qualified to go who are not going.”

Rutgers’ 7-4 season included victories over IAA Colgate (4-7), Navy (1-10) Army (5-6) and Temple (1-10). Southern Miss, also 7-4, lost to Auburn (5-5-1) and Northern Illinois (5-6).

Are there too many bowl games? Tom Starr, acting executive director of the John Hancock Bowl, thinks that might be the case. He understands that 6-5 Baylor and 6-4-1 Arizona do not exactly make a marquee Hancock attraction.

“Admittedly, you’d like teams with more than six wins,” he said. “Sure, you’d like them to have eight or nine wins. But there’s a scarcity of those kind of teams. We’re in a period of parity.

“We think they’ll provide a good game. The ticket response has been good. We’re unopposed during the game on TV so that should give us good numbers.”

Ah, the numbers. The bowls live for those TV numbers. They need not worry about the Sugar Bowl. No. 1 vs. No. 2 is an automatic smash. No. 6-5 vs. No. 6-4-1 is less of a lock.

“We think we’ve got good teams,” Starr said. “Arizona was 13 points away from being undefeated. They beat Washington and UCLA and almost beat Miami. Baylor beat Texas and Georgia Tech.

“We’ve had good teams here, teams like Oklahoma, Florida State and Nebraska. Our only problem this time is we didn’t have a choice. We felt trapped”

The Hancock Bowl’s Tier II status in the Coalition meant it would get the Southwest Conference runnerup for one of its teams.

“Who thought the No. 2 team in the Southwest Conference would be 6-5?” wondered Steve Hatchell, executive director of the Orange Bowl and one of the Coalition’s major domos. “I think there will be modifications. We’ve got to protect investments.”

“The coalition worked,” Starr said. “It gave us No. 1 against No. 2. But there are some arguments beyond that.”