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College bowl game madness

By Tim Wood

This column originally appeared in The Columbia Daily Herald on Dec. 13, 1998

Those of us who do not have orange running through our veins nonetheless can be grateful that Tennessee won the SEC Championship, went undefeated and is headed for the Fiesta Bowl.

Had Tennessee lost a game, the mysterious BCS computer probably would have sent it to the Nowhere Bowl. UT fans, a significant portion of the local population, would have been in a foul mood until next season.

If it weren't for the undefeated season, UT fans might still be mad about last year's snub of Peyton Manning by the Heisman Trophy voters. A UT loss might have meant another snub.

Consider the case of Kansas State. Their one loss meant the difference between playing for the national championship in Tempe, with a $12 million payday, and traveling to San Antonio and playing in the Alamo Bowl for $1 million.

It's not that San Antonio is a bad place to visit. It's just not a top-tier bowl game.

Bowl games just aren't what they used to be. There used to be just a few "bowls," supposedly named after the bowl shape of their stadiums. The names of the bowls even represented things that you might see in a bowl - orange, cotton, sugar, roses, peaches and such. In many cases, the stadiums in which the bowls were played had the same name as the bowl.

Now, I've never seen Liberty or gators in a bowl (except perhaps the Florida Gators), but at one time the bowl season seemed to make some sense.

However, college football suffered bowl inflation. More and more bowls sprung up, and all of the good names were taken. Then somebody decided to start selling the names to make some more money.

Back in the good old days, one could expect to wake up on New Year's Day and watch several familiar bowls I usually started with the Cotton Bowl, with Columbia native Lindsey Nelson as its perennial announcer. That game usually featured a couple of teams from the now defunct Southwest conference battling it out and the Kilgore Rangerettes performing at halftime.

From time to time, one might flip the channel over to the Sugar Bowl, which at one time was held in a stadium actually called the Sugar Bowl.

Afternoon brought the Rose Bowl, which usually featured a ground-oriented Big 10 team being introduced to the forward pass, courtesy of a Pac 8 team. Amazingly, the game is still played in a stadium called the Rose Bowl.

Evening brought the Orange Bowl, which, back in the dark ages, was the last bowl game of the season. It too was performed in a stadium with the same name as the bowl. It usually had a glitzy halftime show, featuring thousands of fans firing off little flash cameras that had no hope of illuminating the field or creating a usable picture. The flashes, nonetheless, were part of the spectacle.

My favorite college team is the University of Missouri, which had a 20-year bowl game drought until last season.

When I went to school, I attended every home game. For the record, I was not one of the fans who tore down the goalposts when Missouri won an away game to earn a trip to the Peach Bowl. My excuse for being there was to take pictures of the madness.

Mizzou had a pretty good team this year. They went 7-4 with three losses to top 10 teams.

Missouri's season resulted in a trip to something called the "Insight-dot-com" Bowl. So now we're getting bowls with high-tech names. What's next - the Microsoft Bowl?

But come to think of it, "Yahoo Bowl" does have a ring to it.

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