By Pigskin Pete

The venue is spectacular.  Getting there (and back) was more than half the fun, but watching Stanford embarrass the Pac10 in the first ever Seattle Bowl was painful.  This was the first football use of Safeco Field, and could be the last.  The new Seahawk grid stadium looms cheek by jowl with the home of the Seattle Mariners and will be ready for play next fall.  This gives Seattle the nation’s finest sports viewing complex, and certainly one of the most convenient, particularly if you leave the driving (and parking) to Amtrak.

We rode the rails from Portland on the sleek new Cascade, which allows you to disembark virtually at the entries to the new stadia.  The daylight ride north offered comfortable seats in the bar car and a panoramic view of Puget Sound and the Olympic range during the last hour.  Upon arrival, there was time for consuming food and beverage at one of several large establishments adjacent to the scene of sports action.  This complex, fans, is what PGE Park could have been had Portland politicians not insisted upon playing nickel and dime footsie with small-thinking entrepreneurs.

Safeco Field is baseball-specific, but a temporary gridiron was shoehorned into the field space.  This worked for football, with a majority of the lower tier of seats closely abutting the action, much as at Eugene’s Autzen Stadium.  The action, however, left much to be desired for an audience expected to whoop it up for the Pac10 representative.  A large contingent of  cardinal-clad Stanford partisans were noted on board our train.  A sizeable slice of stadium seating was devoted to Palo Alto partisans, but they sat on their hands most of the game, mirroring the disinterested attitude of their football team.

Pac10 prestige suffers

Stanford, the only team to hang a loss on mighty Oregon this season, walked onto Safeco Field as the ninth-rated squad in the country, while their foe, Georgia Tech, didn’t rate top 25 notice from pollsters and was playing without their head coach (George O’Leary, who lied his way into, and out of, the job at Notre Dame just prior to this game).  

Pac10 prestige suffered prior to this matchup, when once-haughty USC fell victim to underdog Utah.  The much maligned Bowl Championship Series’ selections for this season’s major bowls caused Pac10 partisans to yell up and down the Pacific coast and into Arizona about a lack of respect in the rest of college footballdom for their conference.  With Oregon voted number 2 in both press and coaches’ polls, a solid Stanford victory in the Seattle Bowl would have enhanced the Ducks’ chances for number one status should they upend Colorado in the Fiesta Bowl on New Year’s Day.

The Cardinal, however, went into a funk after failing to score on an opening drive that featured three straight-ahead rushing failures to score from the one yard line.  This inexplicable coaching conservatism seemed to rip the heart out of the Stanford squad.  With the exception of a brief rally staged in the fourth quarter, Stanford gave the Georgians little cause for concern.  That rally was engineered by backup quarterback Chris Lewis, who should have gotten the call much earlier in the game.

Promotional help needed

Stanford stumbling was done before a crowd numbering perhaps 20,000…though bowl sponsors claimed an attendance of 30,000 in the 46,000-seat stadium.  The halftime show was worthy of a high school game.  The notorious Stanford band did their usual tasteless parody (this time of the aforementioned coach O’Leary).  Then a thoroughly disorganized group of several dozen cheerleaders, billed as all-stars selected from prep squads across the nation, showed what lack of preparation can accomplish for non-entertainment.

If the Seattle bowl is to survive, it should rely upon a Pacific Northwest representative as one half of the bill.  And in a city noted for its contemporary music scene, connections and personnel should exist to stage an outstanding halftime presentation.  There we were, in the midst of architectural nirvana for athleticism, largely created by the Paul Allen pocketbook…and you’d have thought the Seattle billionaire had turned this show, too, over to the incompetence of Bob Whitsitt!

This may have been yet another testimonial to the need for the antiquated and over-populated bowl scene to be supplanted by a national college Division I playoff.  If you’re going to attract national attention with a contest played on the wintry shore of Puget Sound, it should certainly mean more, and be better staged, than the inaugural Seattle Bowl.

Ah well, the train ride was superbly comfortable and convenient, and the only way to go for Oregon sports enthusiasts attracted to contests staged in the state-of-the-art arenas supplanting the unlamented Kingdome.

(C) 2002 Oregon Magazine