Bowl alliance will give UCLA the shaft come New Year's Day

Published: Tuesday, November 25, 1997

Tuesday, November 25, 1997

COLUMN: Great season should yield a Fiesta, not mouth full of Cotton

It's unfair, it's unjust, it's unbelievable.

The UCLA football team is probably going to the Cotton Bowl, and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

Here is the situation, one that is so complex, Paul Boyer could probably get himself another Nobel Prize if he could make heads or tails of it.

The Alliance Bowl games, the Sugar, Fiesta, and Orange, which are the creme de la creme of the postseason football games, are not bound by the same selection criteria that reign over the multitude of other bowl games, of which the Cotton Bowl is one.

While these lesser events have their teams handed to them based on position in their respective conferences (e.g., the Rose Bowl gets the first-place teams from the Pac-10 and Big Ten, regardless of records or rankings), the Alliance games get to handpick two of the six total participants, with the other four being conference champions that get an automatic bid.

So that would leave two wildcards for the bowl selection committees to choose the premier teams to step into the void.

And UCLA fits that bill absolutely perfectly.

Our squad, after its wondrous victory over USC on Saturday (I had to get a plug in there), rose to No. 6 in the latest Associated Press polls. It doesn't exactly take a Paul Boyer to figure out this one: the six best teams go to Alliance Bowls; we're ranked No. 6.

Add to this the fact that Michigan, which is ranked No. 1, is already Rose Bowl-bound. That leaves only four teams ranked ahead of us in the battle for an Alliance bid.

Now, setting the bloody obvious reasoning aside, let's consider the other qualifications that should merit UCLA's playing against the nation's finest come New Year's Day.

Our hearty Bruins, which make up the finest team with two losses in the country, have a nine-game winning streak, a record-setting offense, and are arguably the nation's hottest team after their ignominious 0-2 start.

But these facts are not being considered, and that is why UCLA is getting screwed.

The NCAA and the rocket scientists who chair the bowl committee have decided that the Bruins don't fit one vital criterion, and that's why we won't get the nod from the Fiesta.

We won't bring in enough revenue, plain and simple.

The team that will most likely get the bid, Arizona State, is going because the game is being played on its home field.

The Sun Devils, the 12th-ranked team in the country, are going to an Alliance Bowl, and UCLA isn't.

Syracuse, with its three losses and No. 16 ranking, also gets an Alliance bid because it's the Big East champ. UCLA may not be the Big East champ, but it certainly is the better football team.

That's what is so appalling: One of the premier football teams in the country is going to miss out on the exposure, the recruiting boost and the fun of playing in an Alliance Bowl, because the Sun Devils will draw more fans, and because Syracuse is in a conference that has more suck with the selection committee than Michael Eisner has with any maitre d' in Hollywood.

In essence, what the NCAA has done is establish a system that awards some of the best bowl bids to teams that are clearly inferior, while teams that set the nation on fire, like UCLA, get put out to pasture.

So, instead of being adequately rewarded for a season of excellence, UCLA gets to play Kansas State, arguably the worst team with one loss in the country, in a Cotton Bowl game that will be watched by approximately 11 people who live outside of Kansas and Los Angeles.

There's no excuse, no reason and only one acceptable fate for the UCLA football team.

Problem is, the Cotton Bowl just isn't it.

Shapiro is a Daily Bruin staff writer and beat writer for men's basketball. E-mail responses to mshapiro@media.ucla.edu.