Buried in a blizzard of bad bowl games

AMERICA AT LARGE:Trapped inside by the weather, we were left to survive on the now traditional diet of mediocre collegiate fare, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

THE STRANDED travellers who have been sleeping on airport floors since St Stephen’s Day can count themselves fortunate in at least one respect. They were spared having to watch the Weed-Eater Independence Bowl.

The winter snowstorms which provided a White Christmas across America’s southland hit the Eastern seaboard with a vengeance on Sunday, and played hell with the NFL travel schedule. On one of those rare weekends when both New York teams were on the road, the Giants lost in Green Bay and the Jets in Chicago, and with all three airports serving the Big Apple socked in by the blizzard, both teams had to spend the night in hastily-arranged accommodation at Midwestern hostelries.

The New England Patriots locked up home-field advantage throughout the AFC play-offs when they battered the Bills 34-3 in Buffalo to sew up the top-seed position, but after they did so they had to spend the night in a Rochester hotel because the Boston and Providence airports had shut down.

And, scheduled to play the Eagles in Philadelphia Sunday night, the Minnesota Vikings were uprooted for the third straight week when NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, in a pre-emptive strike, elected to postpone their game even before the first snowflake fell. The Vikings, who had played “home” games in Detroit and at the University of Minnesota after the roof at the Metrodome collapsed, then found themselves a participant in the NFL’s first Tuesday Night football game in 64 years.

Even as Goodell was congratulating himself for his prescience, the governor of Pennsylvania ripped into the commissioner for what he evidently considered a sissified solution.

“It goes against everything football is all about,” fumed Ed Rendell. “We’ve become a nation of wusses. Do you think the Chinese would have called off the game?”

And that was before the match, in which the underdog Vikings handed The Iggles a 24-14 pasting that knocked them out of a second-seed position that would have given them a first-round bye in the January 8th-9th NFC play-offs.

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The Rose Bowl, aka “the granddaddy of them all”, was first played in 1902, and has been played continuously since 1916. For two decades the game in the California sunshine stood alone as a post-season showcase matching the nation’s top collegiate teams, but in 1935 the array of New Year’s Day bowl games quadrupled with the establishment of the Sugar, Orange, and Sun Bowls in, respectively, New Orleans, Miami and El Paso. Two years later the Cotton Bowl in Dallas joined the rotation, and in 1946 the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville became the first “minor” such contest.

The proliferation of “bowl” games, many of them in less hospitable climes, which began in the 1960s didn’t fully hit its stride until the establishment of cable television, when every new channel wanted to have its own bowl game. In the heyday of the traditional bowl line-up, only the rare team could hope for an invitation with more than one or two losses on its record. The product has now become so diluted that any team with six wins is now pronounced “bowl-eligible”, and the result is a collegiate post-season that stretches out from December 18th (the Humanitarian Bowl in Boise, Idaho) and the Beef-o-Brady’s Bowl (Boise State-Utah in St Petersburg) on Tuesday night through January 10th (the Tostitos National Championship Game, aka the Big Bowl, in Glendale, Arizona).

For more than three weeks this procession of mediocrity intrudes on livingroom television sets across the country, sometimes at the rate of two or three a day. To be fair, they’re usually inoffensive, in that no one pays much attention, save bookmakers and their customers and the immediate families of the student-athletes of the involved institutions of higher learning, but in the present instance, the residue of the blizzard of ’10 has transformed us into a hostage nation of bad-bowl watchers.

“But nobody’s making you watch them,” argues my wife.

She’s right. We could always shovel more snow as an alternative form of amusement.

The multiplicity of bowl games and attendant corporate sponsors has spawned at least two corollary trends – a contest, apparently, to see who can come up with the silliest name, and an exponential profusion of opportunities for adventurous young college-aged men to find trouble in exotic locales.

With regard to the former, now that the aforementioned AdvoCare V100 (nee Weed-Eater) Independence Bowl (Air Force 14, Georgia Tech 7) and the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl (Florida International 34, Toledo 32) are behind us, we can always look forward to the January 6th GoDaddy.com Bowl (Miami-Middle Tennessee in Jacksonville) and, three nights later, to the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl (Boston College-Nevada in San Francisco). Yesterday, Maryland and East Carolina played in the Military Bowl, not to be confused with this afternoon’s Armed Forces Bowl between Southern Methodist and West Point.

A special curiosity will also attend today’s Pinstripe Bowl, between Syracuse and Kansas State at Yankee Stadium, which was, last time anybody looked, buried under two feet of snow. This could be a harbinger for Super Bowl XLVIII, scheduled to be played in New York in February of 2014.

We can recall in an earlier, more innocent era of bowl games, when Woody Hayes, the crusty old Ohio State coach, in New Orleans for a Sugar Bowl against Alabama, caught several of his players imbibing in a French Quarter speakeasy, and drove them, like moneychangers from the temple, out of Pat O’Brien’s saloon. Scattering broken hurricane glasses before him, Woody booted the last of his charges in the hindquarters as he chased them out the door.

With Ohio State scheduled to play Arkansas in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, Woody’s old school was visited by scandal last week when it developed that six OSU players, including starting quarterback Terrelle Pryor, had violated their amateur status by selling memorabilia, including uniform jerseys, championship rings and, in Pryor’s case, the “Sportsmanship Award” from the 2008 Fiesta Bowl, to the owner of a Columbus tattoo parlour, receiving thousands of dollars in return.

Following an investigation, the NCAA suspended the Dirty Half-Dozen for the first five games of the 2011 season – but not, curiously enough, from Saturday’s Sugar Bowl game. The ruling was so transparently venal that Woody Hayes must be rolling over in his grave.

Last Sunday, before Notre Dame flew to El Paso for the Sun Bowl, Fighting Irish coach Brian Kelly held a team meeting at which he confiscated the passports of his players as a “precaution”, lest they submit to temptation and seek to amuse themselves in Juarez. (Not a bad idea, on balance, given that the drug wars in that Mexican city have reportedly claimed 3,000 lives in 2010 alone.)

Our favourite tale of the misbegotten Bowl season hearkens back to Monday’s Independence Bowl. During pre-game warm-ups, Ace, the (allegedly) trained falcon who serves as the Air Force Academy’s mascot, displayed his independence by bolting the premises, thus rendering himself the most celebrated fugitive sporting mascot since Pat the Patriot, the guy who dresses up in colonial attire for New England home games, was arrested for solicitation in a Rhode Island prostitution sting last year. Ace was eventually coaxed down from a tree in downtown Shreveport, but only after missing the entire game. Some birds have all the luck.