But this past month, even that extra mile’s distance wasn’t enough to shield me from the steady din emanating from BC. I don’t know if what I heard was the football team itself, some student stragglers or maybe just the boisterous ole-boy booster network. But the steady, chant seemed to steamroll down Beacon Street and fill the air in my quiet neighborhood with palpable excitement: “We’re going to Detroit, we’re going to Detroit. We’re going to the Motor City Bowl!”
Who wouldn’t be excited? Forget the bowl game itself. Just the chance to escape wintry Boston to luxuriate for a few days in downtown Detroit. And Boston College was particularly deserving of this singular honor, having finished fifth, one game ahead of basketball power Temple, in the Big East. Ahead of Rutgers, too! After giving Miami a scare for three quarters and knocking Notre Dame from the undefeated ranks, BC was up for a big-time challenge in the Motor City classic: the University of Toledo, a team from our football heartland that had tied both Marshall and Northern Illinois for the best record in the storied Mid-American Conference. Wow, a chance to go head to head with the Mud Hens (nah, that’s the minor-league baseball team), uh, the Blades (nah, that’s the newspaper), ah the whatevers.
Now how’s this for a major screwup on my part? I actually missed seeing the game. After all that buildup, I somehow forgot the date and time. Seems I got the game confused with my plans to see the Motown movie at the local theater as well as a Christmas-tree lighting at a local car dealer. So I wound up getting just a glimpse of all the football thrills from Detroit, flipping the game on in the fourth quarter when BC’s 32-point lead had dwindled to a precious 23. When they finally secured a 51-25 triumph, I applauded almost as heartily as I did for Joan Osborne’s rendition of “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?” in the movie “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.” Well, maybe half as heartily.
OK, while I’m feeling confessional in this week’s edition of the Doritos, Chick-fil-A Starr Gazing column, brought to you by my friends at PlayStation 2, I’m going to go all the way. With 26 bowl games down and only two more to go, I have not watched a single quarter of a single game. My indifference is far beyond the fact that the 2002 bowls have been singularly lousy (only six have produced a winning margin within a touchdown, only one decided by three points or less). It’s that for too long now, they have been a set of meaningless matchups of mostly mediocre teams. To fill 56 spots, any team with a winning season–almost half the teams competing at the 1-A level–get an invite. And it’s painfully obvious that once virtually everyone is invited to the party, it ceases to be special. Does anybody but a few diehard alums and guys with a bad gambling jones actually want to see 7-6 teams like Purdue and Washington play what is essentially a consolation game even if they call it the Sun Bowl? And that’s a step up from Wake Forest, seventh in the ACC, versus Oregon, eighth in the Pac 10, in the Seattle Bowl.
New Year’s Day used to be one of the most glorious sports-watching celebrations of all, the perfect way for this nation’s couch potatoes to kick off the year and shed a hangover. Each game–the Cotton Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl and the Sugar Bowl–was awash in tradition and featured powerhouse teams, many of which still clung to national championship dreams. (Yes, Dorothy, there actually was a time when there was no Fiesta Bowl; Phoenix hadn’t even been invented yet.) One close friend recalls the holiday fondly as the only day of the year that his mother allowed him and his dad to eat dinner in front of the TV. It was nonstop excitement from morning till night.
But this year the only possible excitement is in the matchup of undefeateds this Friday night, and even that projects as another forgettable mismatch, same as last year’s. And for that dubious prospect, they have stripped the other major bowls of all their history and tradition, indeed their very raison d’etre. The Rose Bowl has always been my personal favorite and, from Ron VanderKelen to Jim Plunkett, I can recite its marvelous legacy. If the Rose Bowl is now going to be just a random affair and no longer about the Big 10-Pac 10 rivalry, then I’m no longer interested. Hell, if I want Oklahoma in California, I’ll rent “Grapes of Wrath” and be assured of a far superior entertainment.
The bowl season today is strictly about the money. Of course, big-time college athletics has been a sham for a long time. Now the difference is that, with the Bowl Championship Series machinations, the name sponsors and the relentless TV lineup of bowl games, all pretense has been stripped away. Then add in the fact that the BCS championship will feature two teams, Miami and Ohio State, that, according to a recent study by the University of Central Florida, graduate members of its football teams at rates of 46 percent and 36 percent respectively. Student-athletes, I don’t think so. (For all the fun I had mocking BC’s bowlworthiness, credit the university as one of only seven in the bowl parade to graduate two thirds of its football team, according to NCAA stats from the ’90s.)
Still, I’m first and foremost a fan, not a scold. This is far more about a poor product than it is about my precious sanctimony. I just don’t see why anyone embraces this inferior bowl ritual when the NFL, at the very same time, offers up a better version of the pro game, not to mention a mesmerizing Super Bowl crapshoot. You can take your Boise State-Iowa States, Texas Tech-Clemsons, and I’ll even throw in “Fear Factor.” I’m sitting down this Saturday for the NFL’s wild-card weekend and strapping myself in for the ride.
So here are my weekend predictions
BCS Championship Bowl: Who cares?
NFL Wild-Card Weekend:
New York Jets 31-Indianapolis Colts 17
Green Bay Packers 24-Atlanta Falcons 10
Pittsburgh Steelers 17-Cleveland Browns 16
New York Giants 24, San Francisco 49ers 21
