Too Many Bowls, Not Enough Quality Teams

Wanted by bowl committees: college football teams with six victories. Must have quarterback, head coach, fight song, ability to travel on short notice. Mascot optional.

Welcome to Operation Saturation.

The era of having more bowl-game slots than bowl-eligible schools may soon be upon us.

With less than a month left in the season, 36 schools have reached the six-win threshold required for bowl participation, leaving 20 schools with work to do in order to satisfy the bloated 28 bowl-game market.

“It’s a frightening scenario,” Las Vegas Bowl executive director Tina Kunzer-Murphy said this week.

Consider the Las Vegas Bowl’s plight: It is supposed to get the Pacific 10 Conference’s fifth-place team to match against a Mountain West opponent.

The problem is the Pac-10 may not have a fifth-place team that is bowl eligible.

In fact, this year, if USC goes to the Orange Bowl, there’s a strong chance the Pac-10 might not be able to fill four of its seven bowl tie-ins.

Situation: Four Pac-10 schools are locks for postseason play: USC, California, Arizona State and this weekend’s winner of UCLA-Oregon (both schools are 5-4).

If USC ends up in the Orange Bowl and California goes to the Rose, Arizona State moves up to the Holiday Bowl.

The Sun Bowl is assured of getting a Pac-10 team, but after that it’s “Katie bar the bowl-room door.”

The Insight Bowl, which gets the No. 4 pick, stands a reasonable chance of getting a Pac-10 team, but it could be tough luck for the Las Vegas, Emerald and Silicon Valley bowls, all of whom may be scrambling to fill vacant slots.

The Las Vegas Bowl is miffed because it has to wait for the regular season to end Dec. 4 because a Pac-10 team might drop into its lap depending on the outcome of UCLA-USC or California-Southern Mississippi.

Meanwhile, the Emerald and Silicon Valley bowls, knowing they virtually have no shot at a Pac-10 school, already are shopping for free agents.

“It’s downright unfair,” Kunzer-Murphy of the Las Vegas Bowl said.

So is this what happens when you have too many bowl games?

Bingo.

This year, more than ever, major conferences may have trouble providing teams for their tie-ins.

Part of the reason is an 11-game season requires that a team have a winning record to be bowl eligible. There is NCAA legislation pending that will allow for 12-game seasons -- meaning 6-6 gets you to the Houston Bowl -- but that won’t happen until 2006.

This year’s mad scramble has bowl officials scouring bottom-feeder conferences for teams that have six victories.

“You have to be half-whacked to work in this business,” Kunzer-Murphy said.

The big winners this year may be the Western Athletic and Mid-American conferences which, in some years, have had bowl-qualified teams that didn’t get a sniff.

Last year, Northern Illinois of the MAC went 10-2, defeating Maryland and Alabama, yet sat home for the holidays.

This year there could be a bidding war for Akron.

“Every bowl game in the country is going to have the WAC and the MAC,” Kunzer-Murphy surmised.

Somewhat amazingly, the most sought after free agent right now is 7-2 Navy.

“Navy is like the cute girl on the corner that everyone is courting,” Kunzer-Murphy said.

Bowls desperate for schools are hocking their bowl wares like trinkets on a sidewalk. Las Vegas is selling, well, Las Vegas, and the fact its host teams get to stay at the Hard Rock.

Incredibly, the shortage of available schools has not slowed the prospect of additional bowls -- games in Denver and San Diego are being proposed.

Pac-10 Commissioner Tom Hansen said there’s nothing the NCAA can do to stop the proliferation.

“The marketplace will determine which ones survive,” he said.

Hansen says he envisions a year when a bowl will not be able to fill its commitments and the game will have to be canceled.

With any luck, it could happen this year.

Uneasy Feelings

It is disturbing to think a decision as to whether Texas or Utah will go to a $14-million bowl might be determined by writers with personal biases and voting coaches with an economic stake.

Utah (9-0) needs to finish No. 6 or better in the final BCS standings to become the first team from a non-BCS conference to make a major bowl.

This week, however, Texas (8-1) moved into the No. 6 BCS position and knocked Utah to No. 7.

Texas, despite having one loss, is ranked ahead of Utah in the writers’ and coaches’ polls and will almost assuredly get the BCS at-large spot unless Utah is a “must take.”

If it boils down to Utah versus Texas, consider this:

Seven of the 61 coaches who vote in the USA Today/ESPN poll are from the Big 12 Conference (the Mountain West has four voting coaches).

If Texas gets the BCS bid instead of Utah, the Big 12 gets to split additional revenue earned from placing a second team in a BCS game.

So, you may ask, which way do you think the Big 12 voting coaches might be leaning?

Craig Thompson, the Mountain West Conference commissioner who is fighting for Utah’s inclusion, does not believe in conspiracy theories but does think the Utah-Texas scenario accentuates the problem of giving more weight to the human polls in the new BCS formula.

“People think I’m crazy,” Thompson said. “I’ve talked all along, I believe more in the computers than the opinion polls. They say ‘How can you do that, it’s hurting Utah?’

“A computer doesn’t care. It has no idea what color jerseys are being worn, where in the two opinion polls that does come into play.”

Writers who participate in the Associated Press poll face the ethical question of whether they should be part of the story they are covering.

Partly for this reason, national college writers from the Boston Globe, New York Daily News and ESPN.com have decided to no longer participate in the AP poll.

No writer from the The Times has voted in the AP poll since the 1993 season.

Maurice Mess

The ongoing saga of former Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett may be the best argument for why true freshmen should be ineligible.

Success came so fast for Clarett in 2002 neither he nor Ohio State knew how to handle it.

Clarett was a live wire from the day he hit Columbus and now is charging the school with things that may or may not be true.

Clarett said this week in a published report that he received cash from boosters, a car and a job that, how should we say, didn’t require much effort.

At a Tuesday news conference, Ohio State Athletic Director Andy Geiger all but called Clarett a liar.

Geiger said the NCAA already has investigated the bulk of the charges and pointed out that Clarett’s credibility was suspect given he was cited by the NCAA for 17 ethical conduct violations.

Geiger also said Clarett vowed to seek revenge against Ohio State.

“You know, in moments of frustration during investigations, he might say something like, ‘I can blow this whole program up’ or something like that, and so we would then say, ‘OK, blow it up. Tell us what you know.’ ”

The question Buckeye fans have to ask is whether winning a national championship was worth the taint Clarett left in the aftermath.

The answer, we suspect, would be a collective YES!

Remember, the chances of Ohio State having its 2002 title stripped are remote. Unlike college basketball, the NCAA does not control football’s postseason.

Hurry-Up Offense

Freedom rings: The Liberty Bowl is talking about holding Utah to its contractual obligation of playing in its bowl should the Utes win the Mountain West title.

Under BCS rules, Utah earns an automatic BCS berth if it finishes No. 6 or better.

If Utah does make it to a BCS game, terms will have to be negotiated with the Liberty Bowl.

Here’s our solution: Work out a deal in which you let potential 11-0 WAC champion Boise State go to the Liberty Bowl to play Conference USA champion Louisville in a pairing of high-powered offenses.

As it stands, as WAC champion, 11-0 Boise State would be stuck in a less-worthy bowl.

BCS computer man Jeff Sagarin is cooking up some strange numbers again: In his ratings this week, Sagarin has Boise State ranked ahead of Auburn.

Last year, in his final BCS tabulations, Sagarin had Miami of Ohio at No. 3 ahead of No. 4 USC.

Dept. of facts and figures: Washington ranks last in five of the 24 statistical categories listed by the NCAA. The Huskies are last in scoring offense, pass efficiency, turnovers lost, fumbles lost and interceptions.

Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden on whether tonight’s game against North Carolina State is a “must-win.” “Somebody asked [Marv] Levy when he was coaching at Buffalo ‘This is a must-win, isn’t it?’ And Levy said, ‘No, World War II was a must- win. This is a game.’ ”

Arizona State will retire Pat Tillman’s No. 42 jersey on Saturday in conjunction with the team’s final home game against Washington State. Sun Devil quarterback Andrew Walter on Tillman: “I had a chance to meet him for five seconds and hopefully I will remember those five seconds forever.”