BIG-TIME BOWLING : Postseason Bidding Threat Rocks College Football Tradition

The traditional bowl-meisters, those happy-go-lucky guys with produce and flora embroidered on their lapels, are in a cold-sweat panic these days. Not so happy or lucky, you can be sure.

Seems that some of the nontraditional bowl-meisters, similarly happy-go-lucky guys except they have corporate logos on their lapels and fresh cash in their pockets, mean to crash their party, turning tradition into a complicated auction.

Sunkist Fiesta Bowl? Penn State and Miami for No. 1, top-of-the-heap, king-of-the-hill in the Mazda Gator Bowl? On New Year’s Day? For highest bid? Is this how college football is to determine its national champion? Is this where? In an automobile showroom? Surrounded by orange crates? Two teams playing for top billing or top dollar, which?

Oh, the commercialization of it all! The crassness of it!

The . . . the . . . prostitution of it all, sputtered execs from two major bowls.

It’s come to this, all right, the new era of postseason play, where anyone’s in for a (million) dollar, causing apoplexy among the men in bright blazers, the guys who used to own the day without having to bid for it.

Oh, it’s bad, all right. Said one executive from a third bowl, commenting on the possibility of a championship game going to the highest bidder, and taking it only a bit better: “You ain’t supposed to be getting into no bidding war, hoss. It ain’t a cattle auction.”

It didn’t used to be, give him that.

It is fair, perhaps necessary, to say what, exactly, college football bowl games are these days. Or what they ever were. We’re here to tell you. Hoss, they were tradition. That’s what they were.

Four bowls, one so old it’s called the granddaddy of them all, carved up Jan. 1 with utmost respect for television ratings and revenue. Enough for everybody. Did it just about forever.

And with their New Year’s Day exclusivity, a nation of grown men gathered like sated slugs before a TV, guaranteeing a nonstop audience, these four bowls--Rose, Sugar, Cotton and Orange--dominated postseason football.

Their tie-ups with all the major conferences assured both a regional interest to help fill up the stands (Dallas folks to watch the Southwest Conference team in the Cotton Bowl) and a conference rivalry to rivet the out-of-town viewers (Midwest folks to watch their Big Ten representative die in the Rose Bowl).

The games, you can be sure, didn’t always match the Nos. 1 and 2 teams. Still, the four bowls have produced all but two of the national champions since the Associated Press adopted its post-bowl poll. More than that, the four were consistent attractions. They were tradition, hoss.

Whatever else it was, it was also sort of automatic. The Southeastern Conference champion went to the Sugar Bowl, the Big Eight champion went to the Orange Bowl. And so on. It was orderly. There was some limited dickering for opponents but, as pay-outs--except for the Rose Bowl, high above the fray, but locked into a non-negotiable team selection with two conferences--were all in line with each other, nothing real competitive.

That’s what bowl games were. But look at what’s happened here, hoss. A couple of independent teams, schools with no automatic bowl affiliation, rise to Nos. 1 and 3, and everything goes up for grabs. Kind of a freaky deal.

Unbeaten Penn State always was a free agent. And top-ranked Miami, unofficially tied to the Orange Bowl, became just as free when it developed that the Hurricanes might have to play Oklahoma again to stay in the home bowl. Who needs it?

So you have two teams, the only two teams in the country that can go absolutely anywhere, to settle this hash.

That and the fact that the Sunkist Fiesta Bowl--it used to be the plain old Fiesta Bowl--which has long since had a New Year’s Day OK, now gets a sponsor that wouldn’t mind a national championship game, and all of a sudden all bets are off. It, along with the Citrus Bowl and perhaps the Gator Bowl, all without conference affiliations, has announced it is willing to negotiate for what looks like a national championship game between Penn State and Miami. Hello, tradition. Uh, how much will that be?

Here’s how it works: The Fiesta Bowl, which seemingly used to restrict itself to Arizona State, has said it will match any bowl in the rush to land a game between Nos. 1 and 2. So Penn State dropped a notch this week, the idea of a national championship game remains.

With Sunkist as its deep-pockets sponsor, the Fiesta suddenly has the money to do it, at least on a once-in-a-lifetime basis. Whereas it gave Michigan and Nebraska about $1.18 million each last year--and was set to pay its teams $1.25 million this season--it is now willing to pay Miami and Penn State as much as $2.6 million each, topping even the Orange Bowl--where Miami might ordinarily go--pay-out of $2.4 million a team.

Oh, so you can buy into this deal? Now we get it. Bowl games are about business .

“About big business, believe me,” admitted Orange Bowl president Stan Marks, apparent loser in this bidding war. But worse than losing this one game is the idea of losing control. “This might never happen again,” Marks continued, perhaps the least exercised of the four major bowl execs. “But all the same, this is setting a bad precedent.”

Among the traditional four’s objections:

--Who do these guys think they are? We were here first.

--A two-tiered pay-out schedule, $2.6 million for Penn State, but $1.2 million for somebody else, is bad for college football.

--Colleges will gear themselves to bidding wars, asking for the moon, or at least the money to buy one.

--Sponsors, the people who empower this bidding, will be the real schedule makers in college football.

--And aren’t we getting real close to a postseason tournament if, on the basis of dollars bid, we can arrange a national championship game?

Without addressing the first objection, let’s skip to No. 2.

Here’s Mickey Holmes, executive director of the Sugar Bowl: “Now I don’t mind any bowl going after Nos. 1 and 2. We’d like to have it, except we have a contract (with the SEC). But what bothers me about this, it sounds like they’ll pay a lesser team a lesser amount. It’s an interesting form of prostitution.”

Says Pete Williams of the Orange Bowl: “It would be kind of an insult, wouldn’t it, if you were offered the $1.2 million just because Miami decided not to come for the $2.4 or whatever?”

Marks, his colleague, adds: “What would stop the Rose Bowl, which pays $6 million, from saying, ‘Well, why don’t we re-do the contract. Let’s go back and guarantee $500,000 unless we get a championship game. Then we might pay $4 million.’ Now that hurts all of college football.”

Rebuttal: Now, first of all, the Fiesta Bowl never meant that this game should go to bid. The fact that it has adopted a two-tiered pay-out schedule is an accident of timing.

Tony Alba of the Fiesta Bowl said that Sunkist guaranteed the money to move the bowl onto the level of the Orange, Sugar and Cotton bowls, beginning next season. Their pay-out, which had gone from $885,000 pre-Sunkist to $1.18 million in the first season of sponsorship last year, was scheduled to go to $1.25 this New Year’s Day and into the $2-million range next season.

“We were to go to parity as soon as possible,” Alba said. “Turned out this was as soon as possible. Still, regardless of what happens this year, we were to reach parity next year. It’s just that this situation, Miami and Penn State, became available.”

Still, the Fiesta Bowl is making this a bidding war. No doubt about it.

“I guess that’s true, although we don’t want to get involved in one,” Alba said. “We’re not going to top the Citrus Bowl or whatever amount they say they’ll pay. All we’re doing is what we said a couple of weeks ago--we’ll match the other three bowls. Like the others, we feel that bidding would be bad for college football.”

But isn’t this just an interesting form of prostitution?

Alba whistled softly. “You mean, isn’t it the American way? If matching up the No. 1 and 2 teams, which nobody else can do, is prostitution . . . I mean, sorry to crash the party.”

There is, of course, the danger that college teams will embrace the idea of prostitution, or whatever this is. “Use me! Use me!” could be the new sideline cheer.

With that much money involved, schools could become very compliant indeed. “If it happens a second time, then you have something that happens as a matter of course,” Holmes said. “You could end up with flat-out bidding and the end result, the only way to interject any sanity back into it, might be playoffs. Then you have loss of bowl control, of selection process, the works.”

Oooh, he said the P word! Playoffs. That’s a word so obscene you ordinarily find it only on restroom walls. Whether it’s good for college football, whether you want to see it or not, is irrelevant to bowl people. It is simply understood that playoffs are bad. They represent the end of a bowl system. The bowl guys would have to turn their blazers in.

Said Jack French, Rose Bowl executive director: “We can say it until we’re blue in the face, but we believe in the attractiveness of the traditional bowl structure, the attractiveness of 18 different bragging rights, allowing conferences to have that long-term tradition.”

And face it, Holmes said of the Sugar Bowl, “this bidding is a potential harbinger for playoffs.”

Perhaps the big fear, the big insult to tradition, is the unstated power of sponsorship. That could be what the outrage is really about. It is Sunkist, after all, that enables the Fiesta Bowl to upset the orange-cart. They are the match-makers in this deal, offering a double pay-out, one-time-only, if it can land a certain, say, championship, game.

The power of sponsors has only just occurred to the NCAA.

“In terms of what the Fiesta Bowl is doing, in terms of whether it’s illegal or repulsive, no,” said Bob Minnix of the NCAA bowl committee. “We’re only concerned about bidding in potentially what it could lead to. It’s the whole idea of sponsorship, the idea of them dictating the game. It’s caught us a little by surprise. John Hancock (Sun Bowl) and Sunkist (Fiesta), fine. We have no problem with that. But what about liquor companies, or cigarette companies?

“If a sponsor is contributing $2 million, they become partners, don’t they? What’s to stop them from dictating what game they want? Wouldn’t they expect, deserve, some say-so?”

Sponsorship is a flammable issue in the bowl game, and is to be deplored to the extent that you do not require it.

“We hope we never see the day,” said Marks at the Orange Bowl. “What we’re afraid of happening is what we see happening: a sponsorship telling you what game to get. What’s to prevent them from saying, ‘Well, you got a conference tie-up, but we think you ought to break it.’ Who’s gonna say no?”

The Rose Bowl, richest of them all, is above all such talk. Said French: “We have no intention of accepting sponsorship. Our (TV rights) fee is very good, our gate is very good. We just have the best bowl situation, financial or traditional.

“We might not always be for the national championship, but we still might beat the other bowls. Last year, with a blowout, we had a rating of 22.7. The Orange Bowl, which was supposed to be for the national championship, did a rating of 22.2.”

But other bowls are not so lucky. As the networks find advertising dollars harder to get, especially in sports broadcasting, bowls are having to sniff around for other avenues of revenue.

Jim (Hoss) Brock at the Cotton Bowl hopes he never sees the day, either. Yet he wonders if it’s not inevitable. Talking about the possibility of reduced TV revenue when the network negotiates a new contract next season, Brock said: “Well, hoss, if you’re going to get a haircut, $2.5 million in sponsorship sure makes a haircut easier.”

At the Sugar Bowl, the inevitable has happened. “We are the first of the traditional four to have their TV contracts come up,” Holmes said. “We went out in the world, looked around and found reality. The marketplace is tremendously deflated.”

So the Sugar Bowl accepted a sugar daddy, USF&G;, for a believed $2.5 million.

“TV simply isn’t in a position to underwrite a bowl,” Holmes said. “The bowls are going to have to get creative.”

Admitted Brock: “We’re going to have to take a good hard look at it.”

For the Rose Bowl, this is “selling souls to one sponsor just to attract a game.” To others it may be survival.