Talent Is Here, Now County Just Needs a Team

The information came in bits and pieces, filtered through a car radio during college football bowl season.

Here’s a confession: This listener was not always paying close attention. How can you when Colorado is pummeling Boston College, 62-28, in the Insight.com Bowl? But the radio color guy was suddenly talking about Colorado sophomore John Minardi, “a gifted wide receiver from Laguna Niguel.”

During Oregon’s 24-20 upset victory over Minnesota, Anaheim’s Reuben Droughns, the talented Duck tailback, had his name called more than once on another radio broadcast. Of course, when Marshall was beating up BYU, the Cougar quarterback, Kevin Feterik, who is from Los Alamitos, got shown in all his frustration as Marshall completed its undefeated season with a 21-3 victory.

From hearing the names, this tiny idea wandered on. How many Orange County kids were on the rosters of Division I bowl teams?

It turns out there were 56. Did you know that there’s an Orange County player at Ole Miss? John Romm, a defensive end from Costa Mesa.

Did you know that Orange County has a population of about 2.7 million? So does the state of Mississippi. And the state of Mississippi had three college football teams winning bowl games this season. Ole Miss beat Oklahoma, 27-25, at the Independence Bowl; Southern Miss beat Colorado State, which has eight Orange County players on its roster, 23-17, at the Liberty Bowl; and Mississippi State beat Clemson, 17-7, at the Peach Bowl.

Where is this going?

Nowhere, unfortunately.

But wouldn’t it be great if Orange County had a college football team to call its own? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of the 15 Orange County players at Oregon could have played Division I football right here at Cal State Fullerton or UC Irvine?

This won’t ever happen. Will it?

Is there some Internet stock billionaire out there who wants to donate some of those billions to start a college football program here? And why would someone want to do that?

There is nothing like college football season to bring communities, cities, counties, states, entire religions together.

You didn’t have to attend Notre Dame to root for the Irish. You only had to be a Catholic growing up anywhere. You didn’t have to attend Penn State to root for the Nittany Lions, to eagerly pack into tiny State College, Pa., on a football weekend. Just being from Pennsylvania was good enough. If you didn’t go to Penn State, surely a mother or father, aunt, uncle, cousin, next door neighbor did.

You can’t create tradition from scratch, of course. You can never just build a field and pretend it is the Yale Bowl or Florida Field. You can’t put up a Golden Dome or pick an empty field, call it The Grove and make it a gathering people from all around who come with picnics and meet in the same place with the same friends five weekends every fall as they do at Ole Miss.

But you can try.

At Alabama Birmingham and at Central Florida, two relatively new universities in states with lots of football tradition, Division I programs have been created. UAB is a little like Irvine, a seriously academic university still trying to make some athletic tradition. Central Florida is more like Fullerton, a state school lost in the shadows of bigger and better Florida State and Florida.

Some colleges, Temple, Xavier, Cincinnati, Marquette, UNLV come to mind, have created the binding college experience through basketball. We’ve all seen UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton basketball. That’s not happening here.

It is nice that Irvine has the largest collegiate swimming pool in the state and that Fullerton has a proud baseball squad. Soon Irvine will have a baseball team too and maybe we’ll have two nationally ranked programs to battle each other. But it’s not quite the same.

Look at Fresno State.

Fresno State basketball teams go to the NCAA Tournament sometimes. The football team goes to bowl games. The entire city of Fresno dresses up in red and makes itself a celebrating presence for those moments.

Our fans get too often criticized for listless participation in the seasons of the Angels and the Mighty Ducks. Somehow, though, it is harder to build passion for highly paid professionals who might be traded or become free-agent wanderers a year after you grow to love them.

There is so much football talent here. All those players can’t go to USC and UCLA. All don’t want to.

In Mississippi any Division I-caliber player who wants to stay in state will have a place. All the Orange County Division I-caliber players won’t find a place at USC and UCLA. Imagine if those 56 Orange County kids on bowl rosters all around the country were playing here. Imagine if some of the Orange County kids at USC and UCLA, Notre Dame and Arizona, were playing college football here. Imagine how much fun it would be to gather five weekends a fall right here at home to grill out, meet your neighbors and root for your team, your Orange County team.

But it’s not going to happen. There’s an empty 10,000-seat football stadium at Fullerton, but the team is gone. It takes money and will, determined commitment, incredible resilience, money, brilliant administration, money, an entire community making the demand and money to start Division I football now.

So we’ll continue getting our college football fixes by hunkering down in front of the TV or fighting the traffic to get to Pasadena or the Coliseum. We’ll hear the names of kids we used to watch in high school as they show up on bowl broadcasts and say, ‘Oh, so that’s where he is.’ ”

Which is too bad for us.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com