By Pigskin Pete

 By the time these words reach the eyes of our audience, play will be underway in the saucers that signify the finale of college football, 2001.  Four bowl games…Fiesta, Sugar, Orange and Rose…are the only ones that truly count in determining the best teams in the land.  That distinction should certainly not be left to the idiots who devised the Bowl Championship Series, whose New Year’s matchups have angered fans, players and administrations from coast to coast.  So, when this season’s play is done on the night of January 3rd, voters in the time-honored Associated Press poll should have the final say in the next day’s press.

We called the following prior to our press time:

 FIESTA. January 1 in Tempe, AZ—Oregon won’t be able to defend its #2 regular season ranking in the AP poll against Colorado.   The Buffaloes have the winning edge up front in their offensive line, which turned loose no less than four running backs to terrorize their foes as Colorado became the hottest team in the land at season’s end. Oregon will score well, and entertainingly, but will have to rely upon their passing attack to stay in the game.  Colorado will dominate time of possession, which almost inalterably determines a gridiron victor. (OMED: January 1, 2002 - Pete had a fabulous record calling Oregon football games this past season.  Perhaps, the best of any prognisticator in the state at 16 and 5.  But, for this atrocious call, in the fall of 2002 he will be replaced by the BCS computer.)

 SUGAR Jan. 1 in New Orleans—Illinois, finishing their schedule @ 10-1, got little attention despite winning the Big Ten.  The Illini are solid on both sides of the ball, have an underrated but very skilled QB and should dominate LSU, which showed three losses coming into the post season. 

 ORANGE Jan. 1 in Miami—Surprising Maryland (10-1) will do well to keep it close against Florida (9-2).  The Terps play in a weaker league than the Gators, and Florida boasts the most explosive offense in collegiate play.

 ROSE Jan. 3 in Pasadena—by remaining undefeated among its peers, Miami earned its place in what the BCS (please remove the ‘C’ from now on) calls the national title game.  The Hurricanes should blow victorious here, but if Nebraska (11-1) somehow ekes out a win, this will anoint the winner of the Fiesta frenzy as the AP poll national champion…and let no voter fail to remember that Colorado 62, Nebraska 38 score.

There are four other games played on New Year’s Day…check our predictions for these:

COTTON, Oklahoma easily over Arkansas; CITRUS, Michigan edges Tennessee;  GATOR, Florida State redeems a disappointing season over Virginia Tech; OUTBACK, Ohio State depth should drown South Carolina.

Post season proliferation

The nation’s plethora of post season matches numbered 25 this time around.  That is too many, as perhaps best underlined by the titanic clash in the New Orleans bowl between North Texas State (5-6) and Colorado State (6-5).  Payouts to participating teams in the 2001-2 bowl games range from $750,000 to $13 million…quite a disparity!  While fans dote on having their darlings qualify for a bowl, the price of admission is scarcely affordable in the lesser contests, where sponsors insist on a qualifier purchasing thousands of dollars worth of tickets (whether used or not)…and then there’s the team travel costs.

Major hurdles to creating a Division I playoff system, as done successfully at all lower levels of collegiate grid play, seem to be political.  There are 63 schools signed up for the BS system.  The six major conferences (Pac 10, Big Ten, Southeast, Big 12, Atlantic Coast, Big East) seek to earn as much post season money as possible and drool over the profitable fact that each league can qualify several members for one of the many bowls.

Minimum number of participants in a fair playoff program would be eight, and keeping all Division I conference titlists happy would require a bracket of 16 teams.  Integrating existing bowls into a playoff system has a seldom mentioned downside…we cannot expect the thousands of fans for each opponent to travel to various neutral (bowl) sites on consecutive weekends, meaning playoff games would have to be scheduled at team home fields until at least the semi-finals.

One thing we can rate as certain:  the current BS system is inaccurate, unfair, stupid and just plain awful!  It is so complicated as to be virtually inexplicable.  Reliance upon computer data creates inequities and a reminder of that maxim of our technological age, “garbage in, garbage out.”  Whatever input is utilized to rank post season major bowl opponents, nothing will be more impressive than going undefeated…as the Ducks remind themselves each day when recalling how close they came to beating Stanford.

However, all Webfoot supporters should be basking in the light of a current #2 ranking in the estimation of both the nation’s sportswriters and college coaches.  Those who have followed the trials—and mostly tribulations—of Oregon football over the decades, it still requires a pinch to remind that this prominence is no dream.

Roses & Raspberries…a vase of violets to the Les Schwab company for staging the nation’s finest pre-season prep basketball tourney…more brickbats to Trailblazer management for creating the NBA’s most expensive payroll without any clear promise it will go beyond the first playoff round, yet commits Paul Allen’s shekels to supporting a non-productive multi-millionaire Shawn Kemp, a swiftly aging Scotty Pippen and a vastly overpaid Damon Stoudamire, to name the most prominent examples of “Trader Bob” Whitsitt’s follies…roses to University of Portland rookie basketball coach Michael Holton, who declares a goal of keeping local prep talent in town for their college careers and if you judge by the results of the play in the annual Schwab display, that talent is considerable every year…raspberries to those who ignore the steadily soaring quality of women’s basketball at both high school and college levels…roses to the ladies for playing the game as Dr. Naismith designed it, a far cry from the pumped up playground style of the NBA…a slight “in your face” reminder to readers who disagreed with this pensman’s preseason prediction that Blazer coach Maurice Cheeks was stepping into an impossible situation for furthering his career…a floral masterpiece to the Dufur Rangers, who again maintained state mastery of that grid circus known as 8-man football.

(C) 2001 Oregon Magazine