Once again, USC proved that the Rose Bowl is an annual mismatch.
Pundits said that this year was going to different. Penn State wasn’t like the other Big Ten teams the Trojans had easily defeated the past two years. The Nittany Lions were quicker and more potent on offense, and they would give Pete Carroll’s team a run for its money.
Instead, quarterback Mark Sanchez led a monstrous first half for USC, who led 31-7 after 30 minutes and never really looked back en route to a comfortable 38-24 victory.
In his postgame interview, USC coach Pete Carroll said, “I don’t think anyone can beat the Trojans.”
So why not give them the chance to?
No, I’m not talking about a playoff—at least not right now. A playoff would in all likelihood be great for college football, but the odds of one taking place in the next few years are slim to none.
I’m talking about fixing the real biggest problem with the BCS right now: the Rose Bowl.
As part of its storied tradition, the Rose Bowl is designed to annually feature the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions in a classic matchup to determine conference supremacy. There’s only one problem: The Big Ten representative has not won the Rose Bowl since 2000.
Over the past seasons, the Rose Bowl has welcomed a Big Ten representative six times. Those representatives are 0-6, with the last Big Ten victory coming when Wisconsin beat Stanford in the 2000 contest.
But that’s only the beginning of the story. The six Big Ten representatives have been outscored by a combined 85 points (that’s an average of 14 points per game), and only one of the six teams failed to lose by double digits—Michigan, in 2005.
The immediate story is even worse. During the past three Rose Bowls, USC has outscored its Big Ten counterparts 119-59. That’s an average of 20 points per game.
The Big Ten isn’t just losing. It isn’t even competitive.
In College Football Community Leader Lisa Horne’s recent article, “Dear World Wide Leader in Sports: Thanks for Nothing,” she discusses what she perceives as a mainstream media bias against the Pac-10 and its effect on the class of the conference, USC. More generally, she discusses the problem of making generalizations about teams based on conferences.
But in college football, each team plays at least two-thirds of its regular season games against conference opponents. Throw in the fact that most teams play at least two or three “cupcakes” in non-conference competition, and suddenly there are very few interconference matchups by which to judge teams.
What college football does give us is bowl games, and over the past three seasons the bowl games have shown that the Big Ten is clearly inferior. Combine the drubbings in the past two national championship games with the three Rose Bowl losses, and Big Ten representatives have five double-digit losses in their past five BCS bowl appearances.
22 comments Last one added 6 months ago — Leave a Comment
Harvey Huddleston 6 months ago
Bowl games are for show & money. Team rankings and standings are for bragging rights and recruiting. The playing of the game is the proof of the "pudding". So,
Get rid of the Rose Bowl's restrictive "contract" and open it to the best teams.
Get rid of sports writers voting for anything except who wrote the best story.
Coaches & players know who are the best teams and the best players.
Get the regional politics out of the Heisman Trophy Award. Let the Coaches &
players chose the winner. They know because they had to play him
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Nate Dunn 6 months ago
Great article and I totally agree. The Rose Bowl should not be tied to two conferences. It should be only one or none at all. If it wants to be tied to two conferences, it should be the SEC or Big 12. Then it can be considered "The grand daddy of them all" like it claims.
I thought the following comment was pretty funny:
In his postgame interview, USC coach Pete Carroll said, “I don’t think anyone can beat the Trojans.”
Did he already forget about the loss to Oregon State this year or Oregon last year? The Trojans are beatable, especially on the road. They struggled against Arizona this year as well. If the Rose Bowl was in a neutral location, I think the Trojans would find the games much more competitive.
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Anthony Elias 6 months ago
haha back when this game was made, the Big Ten was the equivalent to an SEC or Big 12. The SEC and the Big 12 are hot right now...but they will eventually fall prey to the conference cyclical system of strength. And in 10 years maybe the Big East will be the big conference with a couple of teams fit to play for a title like this year's Big 12 or SEC. Should we change the game then too?
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Andrew Kaufman 6 months ago
Anthony,
That's why there shouldn't be restrictive contracts in general. If the conferences aren't on the same "cycle" you get a series of uncompetitive games.
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JT Stally 6 months ago
The "Little East" shouldn't even be a power conference anymore...the MWC is a lot better than them!
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Anthony Elias 6 months ago
Wow...the Big Ten just three years ago won both games they played in the BCS. How quickly we forget. Not only that, the ACC hasn't won a BCS bowl game in eight years besides this year. I never heard anyone say that the ACC should drop their automatic bid. You know why? Because of Florida State. Florida State was every bit as dominant in those years preceding the BCS as USC is now. They started the BCS to give teams like Florida State who would finish in the top 5 every year a better chance to play for the title. The ACC certainly didn't live up to putting a top 5 team in the BCS every year that could win their matchup. And yet, all of a sudden we hear USC and the Pac-10 fans complaining they need a new system? Don't they realize that they are guaranteed a prestigious win every year playing in the granddaddy of them all? Or do they want to risk that for a playoff? I mean, Florida State thought the BCS would mean Championships. Instead the poor conference couldn't get a win until this year. USC and the Pac-10 wants to leave the Rose Bowl and the guaranteed home game? Can't wait to see if they can win every single year...So you'd sacrifice the easy win, money, and prestige in order to just take a shot at the Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma's of the College Football World?
Good for you. What a damn right noble cause! I'm sure Florida State knew what they were getting into...
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Andrew Kaufman 6 months ago
Anthony,
I'm not saying they should give up their spot in the BCS. The SEC and Big 12 Champs have much looser tie-ins but are still guaranteed a BCS berth and the same $12 million dollars that come with it. I think the Pac-10, and specifically USC, would benefit from a similar arrangement.
Thanks for your input!
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Anthony Elias 6 months ago
Andrew,
What I meant was leaving the Rose Bowl. If they left the Rose Bowl it would vastly hurt their chances of winning every year. You guys probably ate up Penn State's 1/3 chunk of tickets. At USC more money goes to them when they play that close to home. More people stay closer to USC which means more merchandise sales, local business benefits, etc. Plus the prestige factor. Why sacrifice all that just to go play someone else somewhere else. A loss to Texas helps you more than a win against Penn State or any other big ten team in the rose bowl? So why take the chance on a loss when you have a sure win at hand? Unless your in the title game, you don't have a chance under the current system to do anything anyway.
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Nate Dunn 6 months ago
All we need are two more BSC bowls. The first four (current BSC bowls) take the top 8 teams (max of one per conference no matter BCS rank). Then, the four winners play in two new bowls, then the final two play in the NC game.
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Anthony Marietti 6 months ago
Why even have the auto-bids? The Poinsettia Bowl pitted two higher ranked teams than the Orange Bowl this year.
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JT Stally 6 months ago
Excellent point! I've made the same argument myself, the Holiday Bowl too! I understand why they have auto bids, but when you end up with the No. 12 team playing the No. 19 team in a game which theoretically features two Top 10 teams, it defeats the purpose.
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Ron Stiles 6 months ago
Utah has proved more than anyone why the bcs does not work. Not only does the pac 10 need to cut its ties, There should be no such thing as a BCS conferance. The rules reguarding the qualifaction on a non bcs conf to become bcs is so overwhelming daunting no one can quallify,
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Andrew Kaufman 6 months ago
Ron,
While I understand what you are saying, especially given this year's results, I think getting rid of the notion of BCS conferences is a bit drastic. Why not just have, say, two spots in BCS bowls go to the highest-ranking teams from non-BCS conferences? I think having some automatic qualification is important because the formula is clearly so imperfect to begin with.
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JT Stally 6 months ago
Somehow my blog didn't ping my article to Bleacher Report, but I wrote a lot about this yesterday: http://jtstally.blogspot.com/2009/01/in-all-due-respect.html
While I hear your point, I agree with a bunch of the comments that it'd be ridiculous for the Pac-10 to leave the Rose Bowl. First of all, the Rose Bowl, as the Granddaddy of Them All, is the most prestigious Bowl game, and the Pac-10 would be insane to leave it. Second of all, it makes geographic sense for the Pac-10 to play in this bowl as opposed to say the Sugar or Orange. Lastly, as you already mentioned, the problem is with the Big 10 not living up to expectation. If anything, the Pac-10 should pressure the Rose Bowl to get rid of the Big 10, but I don't even agree with that...I do agree with the argument that conference supremacy is cyclical and I think that the Big 10 will recover, even if not for another five years.
I was at the Rose Bowl game Thursday, and as USC fan, I certainly would have rather been in Miami next week, but I certainly will never complain about "having" to play in the Rose Bowl game. USC deserved the chance to play for a National Championship, but since they didn't, the difference between beating Penn State 38-24 in the Rose Bowl or Texas 38-24 in the Fiesta Bowl might be the difference between finishing ranked second or fourth, but ultimately, it won't make any difference on the amount of National Championship trophies in Heritage Hall. For USC, it's about National Championships, if we're not ranked number one, I don't really care if we're ranked two or four, and I'd rather keep ties with the Rose Bowl than be ranked a spot or two higher.
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Andrew Kaufman 6 months ago
JT,
I totally understand the points you are making. However after reading your article, I think you will find that my proposal supports much of what you had to say.
In your article you talk about bias against the Pac-10 and how it is perceived as a "weak" conference. What better way to prove that the Pac-10 is on par with say, the Big 12 than to beat Texas in the Fiesta Bowl?
Pollsters pretend to ignore last season, but they don't. Everything from preseason polls to late season perceptions are affected by previous season's results, and the reputation of a team's conference is no exception. A big part of the reason the SEC is considered such a strong conference right now is because of the way its teams have performed in previous bowl games. And I don't just mean the back-to-back titles; the SEC sends at least five teams to January bowls each year and usually fares well as a league in those five games.
Beating Texas would not necessarily have made 2008 a more successful season for USC. But it could have made 2009 a more promising one.
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Steve Kornacki 6 months ago
Between them, there are 21 teams in the Pac-10 and the Big Ten. One of them is dominant, and it happens to play in the Pac-10. That explains the Big Ten's futility in the Rose Bowl. This is not grounds to dissolve a longstanding tradition and to destroy the heritage of the last non-cookie cutter bowl game. These things go in cycles.
Do you remember the pre-2001 days, before Pete Carroll showed up and figured out how to bring the best recruits to L.A.? From '93 to '00, the Big Ten won seven of eight Rose Bowls. This same column could have been written from the Big Ten's perspective back then. Good lord, you want to talk about inferior opposition diluting the value of a team's Rose Bowl victory? How about undefeated Penn State getting stuck with three-loss Oregon after the '94 season. The Lions flattened the Ducks, as expected, but no one cared because, hey, look who they played! So Nebraska won the title. If your assertion is that a Pac-10 school is losing a shot at the national title because it was forced to play a weak Big Ten team, well, consider it a case of what goes around comes around.
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Andrew Kaufman 6 months ago
Steve,
You make some good historical points. But if that indeed is the case, then wouldn't breaking up the game still be a good idea? The bottom line, then, is that over the past 15 years the Rose Bowl hasn't been a game from which both participating conferences benefited.
Also, just to clarify for your benefit and for the benefit of a few other people who made comments: I am NOT a USC fan and I am NOT a Pac-10 fan. I am a Tennessee fan and support the SEC in pretty much all conference arguments. I know I have not been accused of "homerism" or anything, I just had a feeling a few people who commented assumed I was an ardent Pac-10 supporter.
Thanks a lot for the input. I really appreciate how well researched and articulated these comments have been.
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Steve Kornacki 6 months ago
Andrew,
Believe it or not, I actually like the Rose Bowl and consider it the only un-objectionable major bowl because of the Big Ten/Pac-10 tradition. The conference rivalry gives it meaning.
I detest the BCS because it has stripped every other major bowl of tradition and meaning, while failing to create and even remotely fair system for declaring a "national championship." I would like to see college football go in one of two directions, post-season-wise: Either go to an authentic tournament that will crown a legitimate champion (and incorporate the major bowls into it), or revert to the old system where the championship designation was about as arbitrary as it now is, but at least the individual bowl games had their own histories and traditions.
But as long as we're stuck with this rotten system, I'm glad there's at least one bowl that strives to keep a traditional rivalry alive. Maybe the Rose tie-in hasn't worked so well for USC these past few years, but it's worked the other way in the past, and it will again in the future. Like in that old Seinfeld episode, things have a way of evening out.
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Steve Kornacki 6 months ago
Not to belabor the point, but here is why the Rose Bowl tradition is so special:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zctViBi6QQ
The clip is from 1987, after Michigan State beat Indiana to win the Big Ten title. They were a two-loss (and one tie) team, so the 'national championship' was out of the question, but it didn't matter: The Big Ten title meant representing the conference in the Rose Bowl, an honor that every team in the league fought for all season. And when MSU beat IU, IU's coach, Bill Mallory, actually went to the MSU locker room to congratulate them and to fire them up for the Rose Bowl. Just watch it. That's what a rivalry game means, and that's why -- short of a real tournament -- I'll take the Rose Bowl tradition over the other BCS games any day, records be damned.
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Joe Kirshenbaum 6 months ago
So you think playing a team like Texas on a neutral site would really help USC or the Pac 10, when they likely would've gotten creamed?
Let's look closer at the Big Ten's 0-6 record in the Rose Bowl
First of all, take out the 05 Rose Bowl, because that wasn't against a Pac 10 team
2001: Washington-Purdue: Had Washington not lost to Oregon early in the season, they would've gone to the national championship game, possibly even winning it all...Purdue pretty much won the Big Ten that year by default because of luck, becoming the worst big ten champion in years...considering that, UW should've won by more than 10 points
2004 USC-Michigan: You had USC, one of the best teams during the BCS years not to play for a championship, at home... the results would've been the same against any opponent
The rest all involved USC, playing at home, twice against the Big Ten runner up because the champion (in both cases Ohio St.) were busy playing in the national champion game... had they played Ohio St. in the 07 and 08 Rose Bowls rather than Michigan and Illinois respectively, things would've been much different. Had they played Penn St. in College Park, or those two games against Michigan in Ann Arbor, things would've been much different.
Also, your whole point of the Big Ten being inferior to the Pac 10 is invalid, considering that overall the Big Ten has had more success during the BCS years than the Pac 10
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Larry Smith 6 months ago
Big-time college football in the midwest is dead. Long live big-time college football in the midwest.
An 18 year old kid wants to go to school somewhere fun. Somewhere exciting. Somewhere where he'll get to see something new, enjoy a great new place, work with an exciting program, work with energetic young coaches and work in a place where the sun shines and it's a beautiful day just about every day.
What 18 year old in their right mind wants to go live in a dying town in Michigan or some podunk town in the middle of Indiana for four years, especially so they can play at a place where the fans are way, WAY too serious about a bunch of young college kids running around playing a game (especially Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State fans), the coaches are in many cases a bunch of tradition-bound old fogeys and the teams are in a huge downhill spiral in comparison to the rest of college football?
Notre Dame will likely never be good again unless they go the route of Kansas State and inflate their records with weak scheduling. The Big 10 is a conference in America's Rust Belt- the one part of our nation that is quite literally dying off- a part of America where in increasing numbers, more people are leaving than are being born or are moving there.
Big-time college football in the midwest is dead. Long live big-time college football in the midwest.
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Frank the Tank 6 months ago
Here is the value of the Rose Bowl: Ask your grandmother or someone else in your life that has no clue about sports if she could tell you when and/or where the national championship game is being played this year, much less the other bowls, and she won't have a clue. Ask her about the Rose Bowl, though, and she can probably tell you that it's in Pasadena on New Year's Day even though she hasn't watched a football game in years. That might seem trivial to someone that's immersed in sports, but from a global branding standpoint where what matters is attracting and getting recognition from people that don't normally watch college football, it's infinitely more valuable than playing in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, even if Texas might be a better opponent in a given year. The Rose Bowl is a tradition that nearly every American is aware of, while the other bowls are simply large payouts with made-for-TV match-ups. On top of that, both ABC and NBC (along with a few other cable networks) televise the Rose Parade every year where the teams playing that day get talked about throughout the coverage (once again, reaching people that don't normally watch sports). That type of national promotion for the universities outside of the game itself is literally worth millions of dollars in TV time - that just doesn't happen at the FedEx Orange Bowl.
Also, the Rose Bowl is the one bowl game that people actually watch consistently outside of the national championship game. It's shown in the TV ratings, where it is ALWAYS the second highest rated game after the national championship game by a large margin no matter who is playing. Sports economists have stated that the extra value that the Pac-10 and Big Ten gain from the Rose Bowl compared to the other BCS bowls is the equivalent of what the SEC and Big 12 receive from their conference championship games (thus, the Pac-10 and Big Ten have no pressing need to expand and can continue to split up BCS and TV revenue among a smaller number of members). Therefore, the Big Ten and Pac-10 would be INSANE to give that up both in terms of perception, branding, and sheer economic power.
Conversely, the Rose Bowl committee isn't going to cut the tie-ins to (a) the Pac-10, which is the "home" conference and (b) the Big Ten, which is next to the SEC as the BCS conference that travels better than anyone (and it has a wealthier fan base with many more alums that live in California). Whether it's fair or not, the Rose Bowl committee is also old-school snobby - if they were wary of having a marquee team like Oklahoma being the Rose Bowl a few years ago, then they sure as hell don't want teams from Deep South visiting their game even if they are from the vaunted SEC that would create fun match-ups on paper. To paraphrase a comment that I once heard from a USC fan, Big Ten fans from Chicago and Michigan stay in hotels and eat in nice restaurants in LA, while SEC fans sleep and eat in their RVs. Sure, it's all pure stereotype, but for a bowl that is played in the shadow of the most image conscious city on Earth, that stereotype looms large. At the same time, the Pac-10 would actually be hurt the most by moving out of the Rose Bowl since the Big Ten has proven that it travels extremely well to the other BCS bowls in Florida, Arizona, and Louisiana (which is why a 2nd Big Ten team is almost always picked for the BCS every year) but the Pac-10 isn't anywhere near as strong on that front by comparison.
I'm all for some type of 8-team playoff system (preferably using the existing bowl tie-ins), but if that isn't going to exist, then I want the Rose Bowl to stay exactly how it is today.
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