No. 1 Guarantee: Alliance Does Not Guarantee a No. 1

After 20 games spread over two weeks and an investment in excess of $100 million, the Division I-A college bowl ritual determined that the national football champion for 1997 is Michigan . . . er Nebraska . . . er Michigaska.

If the main purpose of the whole exercise was to identify the best team in America--as is the prevailing sentiment--it was an incredible waste of time, energy and money. Those who contend the system will work better in 1998 when the Rose Bowl comes on line are making a major assumption.

Sure, it would have been a gratifying end to the season had the Wolverines, champions of the Big Ten, and the Cornhuskers, representing the Big 12, settled the matter man-to-man or at least zone-to-zone.

With the advent of the super alliance next fall, that will be possible. But it isn’t every year that two undefeated teams with valid claims to the title emerge from among the 111 eligible members of the NCAA’s elite.

A third unbeaten squad in any given season will necessitate a reliance upon the arbitrary and sometimes capricious polls to select the final pair, whereas the presence of a lone team without blemishes suggests the skewering of tradition (as long as a half-century in the case of the Pasadena extravaganza) isn’t worth the effort. Even the best possible scenario, a mini Super Bowl of college powers, is not without negative repercussions for the sport.

Consider if Michigan and Nebraska had been matched in the Fiesta Bowl, which will be the site of the championship game at the conclusion of the 1998 season.

Such a contest would have restricted interest in all the other games--not just the Las Vegas Bowl and the Motor City Bowl, which don’t merit a national audience, but the Rose Bowl and Orange Bowl as well--to students and alumni of the participating institutions and perhaps the travel agents who serve them. As it was, games played in California and Florida 28 hours apart carried national title implications and stretched the attention span.

That’s not to be confused with delaying tactics, which will be employed next year at this time. Having secured the rights to all four games pledged to the super alliance, ABC-TV plans to mete out the entertainment in dribs and drabs.

According to the network’s schedule promoted during its New Year’s Day telecasts, the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl will be staged on Jan. 1, Jan. 2 is reserved for the Orange Bowl, and the championship Fiesta Bowl will take place in prime time on Monday night, Jan. 4. In accordance with recent custom, Sunday, Jan. 3, is the exclusive property of the NFL and its television partners.

Not that it will always take so long to decide who’s No. 1. Why in 2002, when the rotation of the championship finally favors the historic Rose Bowl, the title contest is scheduled for Jan. 3. In the evening.

Both the date and the time will be new experiences to the folks in Pasadena, who once looked upon the gridiron struggle in the Arroyo Seco as an adjunct of the older Tournament of Roses parade that draws more than a million spectators yearly to the prosperous area.

The game had its traditions as well, among them an association between the Big Ten and the Pac-10 that lasted 51 years.

It survived the bowl coalition pieced together earlier in the decade, even the bowl alliance that succeeded it. But for college football to float the notion of an annual championship game, it needed the participation of both major conferences.

Yet even the super alliance remains seriously flawed. The problem is that the bowls have a different agenda.

They exist to promote a region of the country, to attract tourists from the wintry climes. For that reason Rose Bowl organizers have been underwriting trips by the competing teams to Disneyland and Orange Bowl publicists are eager to pose players in bathing suits on Miami Beach. The pictures sent to newspapers are designed to sell the sun to the snowbound.

There was a time when college football accepted the process without reservations.

As they continued to proliferate from four to 10 and from 10 to 20, the bowls spread revenue throughout the landscape, served as recruiting vehicles and, in some cases, even rewarded the players for successful seasons.

But the enormous financial success of the NCAA Division I-A basketball tournament has increased the pressure on administrators to create a vehicle that would tap into the mother lode. Never mind that much of the impetus is from outsiders who have nothing at stake in the educational framework that is expected to govern this activity.

The public, through its emissaries in the media, demands not a mythical champion decided by the polls but a true No. 1 decided on the field of honor.

Why should only our professionals play until they’ve blown out all their knees or separated all their shoulders? The charm of the bowl exercise for me was that there would be 20 winners at the end of every season instead of just one (or two in the case of 1997), but apparently that’s not a sufficient resolution for America’s competitive appetite in the waning years of the 20th Century.

Because bowls never were intended to produce a national champion, because the super alliance is just another attempt to subvert the arrangement into something it is not, mark this as the beginning of an end.

A playoff system seems inevitable but the transition will be painful. The bowls have been too good to college football for administrators to make a clean break, but those on the periphery will die slow deaths as the attention is focused on one game each January.

Who among the armies of bowl volunteers will be eager to donate time to a lost cause, who will want to watch it and who will care to telecast it?

Even the three other major bowls soon will be nothing more than vehicles to hype the final game. Yes, Michigan vs. Nebraska would have been an ideal matchup this time around, but the sight of quarterbacks Ryan Leaf and Peyton Manning operating against the best defenses in the country was not only satisfying but revealing. To these eyes, Leaf’s the one.

I’ll accept the championship hats sported by the Michigan players and the No. 1 headlines held aloft on the Nebraska sideline as symptoms of youthful exuberance.

For perhaps the last time, both viewpoints were correct. Here’s to 1997 and the way it was, 1 and 1A.