Left in the Dark

The itinerary is set, the tickets are beyond sold and they’re about ready to roll out the barrels (of rum), yet no one can say for sure yet whether Jan. 4 will involve football or farce ball.

The Sugar Bowl waited four years to take its turn at staging the “national championship game,” but, in fact, it could be staging something less than that.

Because of fallout from the bowl championship series fiasco, the Sugar Bowl won’t know what it has on Jan. 4 until the Rose Bowl is played Jan. 1.

“I certainly did not want my BCS national championship game to be overshadowed by the Rose Bowl,” Sugar Bowl Executive Director Paul Hoolahan said last week in his second-floor Superdome office.

Unfortunately for Hoolahan, until further notice his signature song is “Me and My Shadow.”

The bowl championship series ostensibly was cooked up to prevent football faux pas, but as ointment it has mostly worked like snake oil.

Six years ago, in an effort to pair the nation’s top two teams, college football power brokers designed a ranking system based on polls, computers, schedule strength and, many would say, hooey.

This season, in a fateful fit, the BCS computers gurgled and churned and spit out the preposterous.

USC ended up No. 1 in both the media and coaches’ polls but finished third in the BCS standings.

Thus, No. 1 USC will play No. 4 Michigan in the Rose Bowl while Oklahoma and Louisiana State, the top teams only in the BCS standings, will meet in the Sugar Bowl.

Many national college football pundits who’d planned to head to New Orleans after Christmas for a week’s worth of Sugar Bowl chronicling have been rerouted to Southern California to chronicle the Rose Bowl.

Even ESPN’s “GameDay,” which crosses the Rocky Mountains every millennium or so, will pitch production tents in Pasadena before turning wagon wheels toward the Bayou.

Many of the national scribes won’t arrive in New Orleans until Jan. 2, only 48 hours before Sugar Bowl kickoff.

Why?

If USC wins the Rose Bowl it probably will be crowned Associated Press national champion while the Sugar Bowl gets boiled down to a murky vat of syrupy goo.

In a sense, the Rose Bowl becomes the national title game until proven otherwise.

The voting coaches have agreed to award the Sugar Bowl winner their national-title trophy despite the fact 37 of 63 coaches cast first-place votes for USC in the last USA Today/ESPN poll.

“What’s the upside?” Hoolahan said of his predicament. “Maybe I save some budget. I was planning on feeding and entertaining the masses of media, having all sorts of events for them that will obviously shrink in size now or disappear.”

Mark Blaudschun, national college football writer for the Boston Globe and former president of the Football Writers Assn. of America, said the Sugar Bowl is a true national-title game only if Michigan upsets USC in the Rose Bowl.

“Obviously, if Michigan wins, it becomes what it’s supposed to be,” Blaudschun said of the BCS national-title game. “If USC wins, though, it’s a curiosity. They can call the Sugar Bowl what they want, but if USC wins, they’re the national champions.”

Blaudschun said a convincing USC victory basically would invalidate the coaches’ decision to award the Sugar Bowl winner their trophy.

He acknowledges this may not be fair to the Oklahoma-LSU winner, but adds, “That’s the way it is. If your No. 1 is not here, sorry, it’s not the national championship. Call it the Congeniality Award.”

Other than a Michigan victory, Blaudschun said, the Sugar Bowl’s best hope would be for USC to score an ugly win over Michigan and either Oklahoma or LSU to win in a rout.

Hoolahan, not surprisingly, is trying to put the best spin on his game.

Truthfully, there are parallel story angles working in New Orleans: an outside angle and an inside one.

The outside perspective has the Sugar Bowl getting lumped into a BCS controversy it had nothing to do with while it loses a week’s worth of pregame promotion to the Rose Bowl.

“The system was never intended to be foolproof or perfect, but it was the system we bought into,” Hoolahan said. “I’m not going to be the one to run away from it and criticize it. I’m part of it. I happen to be the focal point of it this year.”

The inside perspective finds Hoolahan having to fend off questions about the credibility of his bowl should USC score a convincing victory against Michigan.

“The game is what it is,” Hoolahan said. “It’s the BCS national championship game. It’s not the mythical national championship and it’s not the playoff national championship, it’s the BCS national championship. We all know what it is.”

The inside perspective, however, is rosier than, well, this year’s Rose Bowl.

Despite the controversy surrounding the Sugar Bowl, Hoolahan holds an important economic trump card -- he has LSU in the game.

On a recent midweek morning walk through New Orleans, a visitor found calm before an imminent storm.

Bourbon Street was hosed down and quiet, there was no waiting for beignets and coffee at “Cafe Du Monde,” and one could count far more empty carriages lined up than available tourists near Jackson Square.

A mime, posing motionless as a man walking a dog across the street, stood little chance of becoming a hit-and-run victim.

In a few days, though, he won’t be able to bend down to pick up a quarter in the French Quarter.

The invasion of LSU fans is expected to rival, if not exceed, the city’s annual stampede during Mardi Gras.

Although the LSU campus is only 75 miles from New Orleans, the Tigers will be making only their 14th appearance in the Louisiana Superdome.

BCS bowls are keenly interested in protecting their national reputations and garnering high television ratings, yet their primary mission is to provide economic punch to their host cities.

Hoolahan says the Oklahoma-LSU impact on New Orleans’ coffers will “be off the charts.”

He conservatively estimates the game will generate $250 million for the economy, compared to four years ago, when the BCS title game between Florida State and Virginia Tech earned $230 million.

“We may not get 100% hotel occupancy with LSU being able to drive in,” Hoolahan said, “but my suspicion is we will get a lot of people who want to come and be a part of the atmosphere.”

Merchandise sales?

“There won’t be enough apparel to sell,” Hoolahan said. “Anything with Oklahoma or LSU on it, they’ll be dropping it in by planes. The street atmosphere around the game will be phenomenal.”

This year’s Sugar Bowl ticket is hotter than Tabasco sauce. The 72,000 available tickets have long been sold and each school receives an allotment of only 16,000.

When you consider that more than 90,000 fans attend home games at Tiger Stadium, you can imagine the frenzy.

“Do the math,” said Herb Vincent, LSU’s associate director of athletics. “Sixteen thousand tickets for 93,000 fans. It just doesn’t work.”

Vincent was in charge of devising the ticket priority plan for this year’s bowl game and said there is no way to satisfy the demand.

He said LSU’s Sugar Bowl appearance “may be the biggest event in the history of the school.”

Many ticket-seeking LSU fans were outraged to read a recent front-page story in the Times-Picayune that reported local restaurant owner Joe Impastato had purchased 1,000 tickets for this year’s game from a former Sugar Bowl ticket manager.

Hoolahan said he was “not happy” about the situation and said Impastato had unauthorized access to tickets.

According to the newspaper, about 20,000 tickets have been purchased by Sugar Bowl season-ticket holders, another 5,000 went to LSU fans who bought the tickets two years ago, and ABC, Nokia and other game sponsors received 15,000.

Tickets have a face value of $150, but can be sold for much higher amounts when included as part of packages.

So how will the Sugar Bowl make out in the end?

Hoolahan can only watch the Rose Bowl and wait.

Needless to say, he’ll be rooting for Michigan to defeat USC.

“You know, what’s the sense of griping?” Hoolahan said. “You make the best of whatever happens. We’re happy to be part of the rotation, happy to be involved. Complaining about it is counterproductive.”