Fans would have benefited from better BCS scheduling

Sporting News, The, Jan 18, 1999 by Mark Blaudchun

Now that the 1998 college football season is behind us, it's time to look at how the Bowl Championship Series format functioned and how the rest of the bowls fared.

Most of the games were competitive and entertaining--all any bowl organizer can ask for. Some examples:

* Motor City Bowl. Marshall and Chad Pennington outlasted Louisville and Chris Redman in this shootout, 48-29.

* Alamo Bowl. Drew Brees passed Purdue to an upset of Kansas State.

* Holiday Bowl. Arizona gave Nebraska its first four-loss season in 30 years,

* Rose Bowl. UCLA again proved it could not outscore quality teams or stop a quality running back--see Dayne, Ron.

But what bothered us was the lineup on New Year's Day. None of the games carried national significance--other than maybe the late-night Sugar Bowl, with Ohio State playing for an unlikely share of the championship.

New Year's Day always has been college football's day--except when it falls on a weekend and the NFL plays its wild-card round. Morning till midnight, the focus is college football.

This season, with snow storms pounding the Midwest and the East blasted by sub-freezing temperatures, the television audience was captive and hungry--for some meaningful college foot-ball. It got the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl, which was fine--they're part of the BCS. It didn't get the Fiesta Bowl and Orange Bowl.

It wasn't done--but don't think it couldn't be done. On college football's biggest day, the sport should serve up its best, games between conference champions and Top 10 teams.

The powers that be should have reserved the 8:30 p.m. slot for the Fiesta Bowl and its national championship game, stuck the Rose Bowl in its traditional 5 p.m. slot and jiggled the Orange and Sugar into late-morning and mid-afternoon slots.

Put those four games--and nothing else--on ABC, and the ratings would have been astronomical. The excitement would have been continuous, building up to the Fiesta Bowl.

Sure, moving the Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl to earlier times breaks from tradition, but ABC gave away tradition when it moved the Orange to January 2. ABC gave away tradition when it allowed the Rose Bowl, which normally begins early in the afternoon in Pasadena, to set its kickoff at 5 p.m. local time in January 2002. That means the entire national championship game will be played under the lights.

If ABC is worried about other bowls crying restraint of trade, let those bowls schedule their games against the BCS bowls and take their chances. Chances are, they would back off.

The way it is now stinks. The games early in the day mean nothing, and there are too many of them.

I know what ABC is doing. It's trying to have it both ways, figuring the lesser bowls will draw an audience on New Year's Day and putting all the BCS games in the prime-time, higher-viewership slots. That stinks, too. We hear about college presidents being against a playoff, how they don't want to make the season longer and how they want to preserve the bowl system.

What better way to do that--if a playoff isn't an option--than ending the season on the night of January 1 with a national championship game that will have tradition and meaning?

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