Boycotting the Rose Bowl Game

I decided not to watch the Grand-Daddy today.

Missed an opportunity to see the beautiful Song Girls today

For firsts, the outcome was never in doubt. USC blows out every out of conference opponent they face every year, especially in bowl games. Why would the fighting Zookers be any different? The Men of Troy are bred to win big games; Pete Carroll has built a group of players with a championship pedigree. When the other team is a bundle of nerves, USC is cold as ice, and they dispatch their competition with an executioner's efficiency.

Also, while I love me some USC Song Girls, the Men of Troy are one of the more annoying teams to watch blow out another team because of the way they insist on playing their "Fight On" theme song after every first down & touchdown. The list of teams that are horrible to watch in blowouts are as follows...

(Just imagine hearing these theme songs more than 30 times in a 3-hour stretch)

3.) Southern California -- "Fight On"
2.) Oklahoma -- "Boomer Sooner"
1.) Tennessee -- "Rocky Top". Hands DOWN the worst!

And, the three best chants in college football:

3.) Alabama -- "The Rammer Jammer" (and another good version)
2.) Kansas -- "Rock Chalk Jayhawk" (FF to the 1:00 mark)
1.) Florida State -- "War Chant". Nothing more intimidating.

I feel like you need to know these things.

The second reason I wasn't real big on watching the Rose Bowl today is their stance on a College Football playoff. With the system we already have in place, we could have a "Plus One" Championship Game with the top 4 teams playing off for the championship. The ONLY thing holding this back is the Rose Bowl & the commissioners of the Pac-10 and Big Ten. Here's an excerpt from an article by Austin Murphy on CNN/SI:

Baseball players, basketball players and golfers all miss substantially more classes. "Football players miss four or five Friday afternoons a year -- on a day most of 'em don't even have classes," says DeLoss Dodds, the athletic director at Texas, who believes the buzz created by a playoff would equal if not surpass the excitement of the Final Four in basketball. "If we had an eight-team playoff," says Dodds, "it would capture America."

In the next sentence he explains why it can't happen. "The plus-one won't work," he says, wearily, "because to do it, you've got to seed the [top] four teams. And if you do that, the Rose Bowl won't accept it."

Confirming that is Pac-10 commissioner Tom Hansen, who replies, "Uh, no," when asked if his conference is open to the possibility of a plus-one.

"If you seed the teams, and that's the only fair way to do it," he says, "then you're going to seed the conference champions out of their traditional bowl games. And that would be very injurious to all those games."

Have I mentioned that I like the USC Song Girls?

So "injurious" and abhorrent do Hansen and his ilk find such crime-against-nature bowl matchups that they are only too pleased to block the path to a playoff. And so tied to tradition is the Rose Bowl that, having lost Ohio State to the title game, it invited 13th-ranked Illinois, the only three-loss team to get a BCS bid, to face USC. The sport is being held hostage, as one frustrated AD puts it, "by the Rose Bowl parade."

Springing to the defense of his Pac-10 counterpart is Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, who together with Hansen forms a kind of Axis of Obstruction. Pointing out that their conferences already compromised once, back in 1998, when they joined the Bowl Alliance -- later christened the BCS -- Delany says, "We gave up a lot. I don't feel like we're takers. I feel like we're givers."

It is the rest of college football's problem that they are no longer in a giving mood. That nine-year-old decision to play ball with the Bowl Alliance "was not a first step toward a playoff," Delany emphasized last Friday, "but a last step." The Big Ten, Pac-10 and Rose Bowl recently signed an eight-year deal with ABC. (Fox has the rights to the four other BCS bowls in a contract that runs through 2014.) Says Delany, "We intend to honor that commitment."