Once, college football matched its big-time bowl participants according to secretive handshake deals aimed at filling the hotels and restaurants of the communities involved. Obviously, the process had its flaws.
Stack that archaic system up against what we’ve got now, however, and see if any of those old, smoke-filled rooms would have spit out the Northern Illinois Huskies as one of the teams in the Orange Bowl game.
Northern Illinois? Why, they’ll be lucky to sell out the northern end of Sun Life Stadium with partisans traveling strictly to cheer the Mid-American Conference champions. Home attendance for the Huskies averages only around 15,000.
Oklahoma, one of the headliners left out of the BCS bowls, gets twice that many for its spring football game.
This is what you get from years and years of college football twisting itself into knots to come up with a perfectly equitable bowl system that matches the two best teams in a official national championship showdown without seeming to lock out any program, large or small, from the process.
Can’t be done without a significant amount of pain and suffering and, occasionally, a run of outright lunacy.
Can’t be done this year without Northern Illinois vs. Florida State in the Orange Bowl, and a five-loss Wisconsin team vs. Stanford in the Rose Bowl, and Louisville, a statistical smudge near the bottom of the BCS standings, vs. Florida in the Sugar Bowl.
We could trudge through all the small print in the BCS contract to explain exactly how things like this happen, but who needs the headaches, especially with a four-team playoff system coming to wipe all this away in 2014 and to introduce new and exciting loopholes that no one has even thought of yet?
Suffice it to say that Northern Illinois and Kent State played last week for the championship of a conference that has to play its games on Tuesday and Wednesday nights just to carve out a spot on ESPN2. The loser got a spot in the GoDaddy.com Bowl and the winner got one of the BCS’ coveted Big Daddy bowls.
That’s one whale of a difference for a game that made no difference at all to most of America.
Drop the template of the 2014 season’s playoff over all of this and something more sensible and more marketable emerges — Alabama vs. Florida in one national semifinal and Notre Dame vs. Oregon in the other.
What really gets interesting is a trip back in time to the days before the BCS. Notre Dame didn’t need to be written into anybody’s contract back then. If the Irish were good and the Irish were available, everybody fought to get them for the brand name alone.
The SEC champion, likewise, was always welcome to stampede its fans through the French Quarter on a Sugar Bowl holiday, and either Nebraska or Oklahoma was pretty much a lock for the Orange Bowl. The Rose Bowl, meanwhile, took the winners of the Big Ten and the Pac-10 and put on a magnificent parade that, by all rights, should have had broadcaster Keith Jackson as its grand marshal every single year.
Sounds pretty monotonous but the intersectional matchups sparkled and the occasional complication of a split national championship was absorbed with a minimum of civil unrest.
Here, for instance, is how it worked in 1988, the last time Notre Dame won a national championship.
No. 1 Notre Dame beat West Virginia in the Fiesta Bowl’s unofficial title match of unbeatens.
No. 2 Miami, with its only regular-season loss coming against the Irish, roughed up Nebraska in the Orange Bowl.
FSU won a close one over Auburn in the Sugar Bowl, with Deion Sanders closing the deal on an end-zone interception, and Michigan upset USC in the Rose Bowl.
Not too shabby, especially when compared to the placement of Northern Illinois in one BCS bowl and Louisville in another.
Put those two teams together in a saner world and a Little Caesars Bowl would break out.
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