The Fan Pays Price; Bowls Reap Dollars

Appearing last week in Pasadena to spread faith among the aborigines, Bo Schembechler and Larry Smith, Rose Bowl coaches again, agreed to fight sin.

Both testified on the evils of a college football playoff that would bring each season to a tidy finish, pointing to undue pressures on the entertainers.

Smith said that a football tournament would serve only to satisfy the sporting press, failing to note, parenthetically, he had made reference to America’s ablest minds.

Committed nobly to academia, Schembechler cited a more serious problem. A playoff, he explained soberly, would distract the student-athlete from his books by extra time required on the field.

This was enlightening to most of us, previously deluded into believing that when studies and football went up for grabs, studies finished a faltering second, as they do in basketball, which begins a tournament in mid-March and strays into April.

“Do you understand academia?” today’s athlete is asked at some institutions.

“I think so,” he answers. “It’s that nut that grows in Hawaii.”

Bo is pictured telling you, “Look, if football coaches weren’t interested in studies, why would we red-shirt players? We keep them on the campus an extra year chiefly because we want them to get more educated.”

Schembechler and Smith are good coaches. Seasoned on the job, each also has a good sense of self-preservation, explaining why they would oppose a playoff.

The way things now stand, Bo and Larry open each season with only a team or two to beat in order to land in the Rose Bowl. The rest of the conference opponents you send for coffee. For Bo and Larry, life is one of sweet irresponsibility. They get to the Rose Bowl, and the alums are happy, and the president is happy.

The only boat-rocking comes from those wretched authors who put the knock on you if you lose.

“Hey, Bo,” they might note, “we’ve seen more speed in shuffleboard.”

But such yellow journalism notwithstanding, the present arrangement for Bo and Larry is hard to beat, explaining, logically, their eloquent plea for status quo.

Nor will you find bowl promoters in favor of a tournament. At a meeting of these promoters, bringing together bowl families from about the land, a poll was taken on whether a playoff should be considered.

The only one voting in favor was the executive director of the Bluebonnet Bowl, which, as you know, would enter into rest.

“They raised so much hell that I would even give thought to a playoff,” the man wrote us, “that in order to keep the peace, I agreed to go along with them.”

Knowing the distaste of bowl promoters for a tournament, Joe Paterno, coach of Penn State, introduced an idea 10 years ago that would produce a playoff palatable to bowl operators.

Joe proposed that after the bowl games were played, four teams would be selected for a tournament by a qualified committee. Two games would be played a week after the majors staged their bowls, and a final would follow a week after that to determine a national champion.

Joe would have billed his grandiose event as “Super Saturday,” matching in scope “Super Sunday” of the pros.

And what did he aim to do with the massive fortune his tournament would dredge from TV, live gate and ancillary monies?

He would hurl it into a fund to help colleges down on their luck athletically, attempting to keep their programs alive. As a case in point at the time, he cited Evansville, the Indiana university wiped out in basketball by an air crash that killed its team.

But Joe’s plan drifted into the water closet, as have countless other plans for a postseason tournament that might upstage, or dilute in some way, the bowls.

The inveterate fan hates those who prevent a tournament from getting airborne, as tournaments get airborne in basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey, volleyball, tennis, rowing, even wrestling.

At season’s end, the fan doesn’t want a debate. He wants a champion decided on the field. He assays bowl promoters with a twinge of contempt, compromising their dignity with cheap sellouts to corporate sponsors. They want cash with which to ace out their neighbors, scratching and clawing for prime teams.

All this interplay is generated to circumvent a tournament that the real football guy wants.

And when Bo Schembechler and Larry Smith stand up there, sermonizing on pressures and studies, they obstruct progress.

Miami, Alabama, Auburn, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida State, Nebraska, USC? These are fortresses of student football players?

Bo is credited with dry wit, but this is stand-up comedy.