Who’s No. 1? Who Knows With New ‘Super Alliance?’

The people who call the shots for the major bowl games got slapped twice last weekend.

At the rate things are going, the rest of us could be reeling by the time the college football season grinds to a halt.

Again.

After watching marquee names like Notre Dame, Colorado, Miami and Texas lose last weekend and fall out of contention for the national championship, the boys in the blazers must have figured that was as bad as it was going to get. Wrong. Even worse news awaited them at the top of the rankings last Sunday.

Still poised at No. 1 was Penn State, which has been there since the preseason poll, and gave no indication it was going anywhere by destroying Temple 52-10. Climbing into the No. 2 spot, meanwhile, was Washington, which clobbered San Diego State 36-3 and leapfrogged idle Florida in the process.

So what?

So this: Neither team yet belongs to the “Super Alliance” that held a news conference a few weeks ago to remind us for the millionth time why major college football doesn’t need a playoff. The Super Alliance, you’ll recall, replaced the Bowl Alliance, which used to call itself the Bowl Coalition.

What’s in a name? In this case, a spotty past. What has remained constant, anyway, is that the fast-talking, fashion-challenged, deal-making crowd that promised to clean up after the messy split-championship seasons of 1990-91 is still making promises on which it may not be able to deliver.

This same bunch promised to do whatever was necessary to ensure a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup to end each and every season. They then proceeded to make offers to the glamour conferences, glamour independents and glamour bowls that they were certain couldn’t be refused. But somebody--several somebodies, actually--refused.

It happened to be the people who run the Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences, as well as the Rose Bowl, that cozy little stadium in Pasadena where they stage their own little postseason tournament.

In the past, that hardly would have been a worry. Other than Washington’s half-share of the 1990 title, no Pac-10 team had been part of the national championship picture for nearly three decades. And before Penn State made the Big Ten number 11 teams, the last time that conference had a No. 1 team was Woody Hayes’ 1968 Ohio State contingent.

But with coach Joe Paterno and the Nittany Lions in the Big Ten fold, that omission alone guaranteed the alliance a perpetual headache. The Huskies resurgence threatens to make it a migraine.

We have been down this road before. Three seasons ago, Nebraska claimed a national title that had Paterno’s smudged fingerprints on the side. Last season, Pac-10 champion Arizona State was ranked No. 2 and Big Ten champion Ohio State was ranked No. 4 when they met in the Rose Bowl. Ohio State won, but had the result been the other way around, the Florida State-Florida game played at the Sugar Bowl, a match between Nos. 1 and 3 going in, would not have produced a clear-cut national champion.

Give the alliance people credit for this much. They were persistent. They went after the Big Ten and Pac-10 and got them to come on board beginning after the 1998 season. The two conference champions will join the champions of the SEC, Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12 and Big East, with the two remaining slots available to at-large teams (read: Notre Dame). The same deal puts the Rose Bowl into the rotation alongside the Orange, Sugar and Fiesta for the title game.

It’s worth remembering that this season still has a long way to run, and that Penn State and Washington could both be faint memories by the time it is over. But it’s also worth remembering that the “Super Alliance” makes the same old phony arguments against a playoff and has so far managed to stave one off. And that this alliance is made up of the same old civic types who ramble on about educational trips to places like Sea World and Disneyland, as though the purpose of the bowls is to provide a week of fun in the sun for a swell bunch of student-athletes.

If everybody were really concerned about the kids’ academic load, there would be more study halls. And their coaches wouldn’t make twice what their professors do.

The real purpose for the bowls, of course, is to drum up tourism and make money for everybody involved--the schools, the bowls and the cities that put out the welcome mats.