Barnett Ought to Be Fixture at Rose Bowl

Welcome, Northwestern. We want your coach.

We’ve got this situation, see. Maybe you could help. At UCLA, we are in serious need of a football coach who can take his team to the Rose Bowl, and I don’t mean only for home games. You purple people, you have such a coach. Could we have him, please?

The guy’s name is Gary Barnett, and I believe we should do everything possible to persuade him to leave Northwestern for UCLA. For example, Barnett is scheduled to be a guest on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” later this week. Jay, you could really help UCLA’s cause. Come out with the Dancing Barnetts.

I wouldn’t want to exaggerate how popular Barnett is on campus now, but Warren Beatty could sit beside him at a Northwestern alumni dinner and women would ask: “Who’s that guy with Coach?”

Da Wildcats are the biggest thing in Chicago right now, outside of Oprah’s old slacks. I mean, this Barnett is so popular, I’m surprised they aren’t talking about knocking down Dyche Stadium in Evanston and building him a new one in Gary, Ind. (Wait a minute. They already named the whole town Gary. This guy really is big!)

Northwestern has arrived in California to begin rehearsal for the Jan. 1 “granddaddy of them all” football game, the Rose Bowl, which nearly gave my poor old granddaddy a heart attack when he heard Northwestern was in it. The team is practicing in Irvine, where the wind chill today is expected to be a brisk plus-80.

Practice was closed by Barnett, who obviously doesn’t want us to see him oiling up those football-playing robots that Northwestern professors built in their science lab. Come on, you don’t think these are real, flesh-and-blood Northwestern athletes, do you? These guys are way too good. Trust me, Barnett runs them with a remote control from Radio Shack.

As far as I’m concerned, Gary Barnett is the coach of the year, of the century, of the millennium. I personally put him third on my list of heroic action figures, right behind Hercules and Xena. We should stop at nothing to lure him, short of asking him to father Madonna’s child.

I apologize to Northwestern for trying to steal your coach. It’s just that Terry Donahue has quit as UCLA’s coach to go into television, where he will be providing such outspoken analysis as: “They look to be about a yard short” and “You can throw the records out the window for this one.”

UCLA needs someone fresh. Donahue recently speculated that athletes choose a school, not a coach, but I think he must have gotten some bad Gatorade or something. Does he think a jock wouldn’t care whether his coach would be Gerry Faust or Lou Holtz? Wouldn’t care whether his coach would be Jimmy Johnson or Dennis Erickson? Wouldn’t care whether his coach would be Bo Schembechler or Gary Moeller?

A key player from the USC Trojans, Northwestern’s foes for the roses, laughed aloud the other day and said: “If we win the Rose Bowl, UCLA’s in big trouble. We’ll get everybody.” Meaning recruits.

If only UCLA could counterattack by hiring Gary Barnett to be coach, all of those blue-chip monsters committed to Northwestern could stand up and say: “Hey! Now I think I’ll go to UCLA! It wasn’t necessary to get all those straight A’s! I could have slept through that damn algebra!”

UCLA isn’t going to hire Rick Neuheisel, who decided to stay at Colorado and listen to John Denver albums. And it isn’t going to hire Glen Mason, who announced to the world that he was leaving Kansas for Georgia because it was the greatest job in the whole wide world. Yeah, who would want to live in California when you could live in Athens, Ga., where many of the 7-Elevens stay open 24 hours a day.

Going after Gary Barnett is obviously the thing to do for UCLA, but there’s a problem. The coach couldn’t say a peep about it before New Year’s Day. He would hate to bail on his Wildcats right before the biggest game of their lives. They might take him to Disneyland and throw him off the Matterhorn.

So, UCLA has to be sneaky. Meet with Barnett some place secretly, maybe on the island of Catalina.

I have seen the man coach. He could walk there.