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

Tuesday, November 25, 1997

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

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 [email protected].