Dean Juipe: Bowl game still faces selling job

Friday, March 28, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

CHANGE HAD to come. The Las Vegas Bowl, a postseason football game with five years under its belt, had fallen into a perpetually unappealing state.

Matching the Big West Conference and Mid-American Conference champions wasn't working from a financial standpoint. Average attendance was around 11,000, with only 10,118 taking in last year's game between Nevada-Reno and Ball State.

Even the Mid-American folks were displeased, and they jumped at the chance to put their champion into a new bowl game to be played annually in Pontiac, Mich.

On top of that, Las Vegas clearly outgrew its association with the Big West, UNLV having withdrawn from the league last year to join the Western Athletic Conference.

Facing termination if it couldn't be restructured, the Las Vegas Bowl apparently will survive with thanks to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Upping the payouts from $150,000 to $800,000 per team, the LVCVA dropped its association with the Big West Conference and inked a deal with the WAC.

As a result, the WAC will send its "third-best team" to the Las Vegas Bowl, where it will be matched with an at-large team from another conference (or an independent). Pending NCAA approval next month, everything is set.

On the surface, it's an excellent move. The teams will be better and a switch in the game time from a chilly Thursday evening in December to a Saturday afternoon -- Dec. 20 this year, if TV goes along -- vastly improves the possibility for a decent crowd.

Yet dig a little deeper and the shortcomings become apparent.

If the new format had been in place for the 1996 game, the Las Vegas Bowl would have had the No. 3 WAC team -- either Wyoming or Colorado State, but probably CSU because Wyoming played here during the regular season -- against an available team with a winning record (as stipulated by the NCAA). Now, get this: Aside from four WAC teams, only seven teams in Division I had winning records last season yet didn't receive a bowl bid. (Actually, the real number is six, because Notre Dame refused all bowl bids.)

Assuming the Las Vegas Bowl is at the bottom of the bowl pecking order, it would have had to match CSU with one of these teams: East Carolina, Louisiana Tech, Oregon, Southern Mississippi, Cincinnati or South Carolina.

Of that group, Oregon, despite being only 6-5, probably gets the call because of its Pac-10 affiliation. So it would have been CSU vs. Oregon, and how many tickets do you think that would have sold locally?

The answer, of course, is not many.

But with 17 bowl games already in existence, strong at-large teams are at a premium. Maybe Las Vegas can muscle its way up to where it isn't saddled with the 34th pick, yet maybe it can't do it either and a CSU-Oregon-like pairing will be the standard fare.

If that's the case, the Las Vegas Bowl still has some selling to do.

Failing that, for locals at least, the game might always be a bore.