Columnist Ron Kantowski: LV Bowl needs recipe for success

Friday, Dec. 17, 1999 | 11:59 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is sports editor of the Las Vegas Sun. Reach him at ron@vegas.com or 259-4088. Regular columnist Dean Juipe has the day off.

When it comes to the Las Vegas Bowl, re-invention is the mother of necessity.

The eighth installment of our postseason "classic" is set for Saturday and like most of the first seven in the series, this one will look only vaguely similar to the one before.

The game started eight years as a reincarnation of the California Bowl in Fresno, featuring champions from the lightly regarded Big West and Mid-American Conferences.

When UNLV bolted the Big West and joined the Western Athletic Conference, the Las Vegas Bowl let its contracts with the Big West and MAC expire and likewise enlisted with the WAC.

The hope was that one day UNLV would be good enough to qualify for the bowl and guarantee its success, but that hasn't happened. The last two LV Bowls have matched a WAC also-ran against an at-large team (Oregon in 1997, North Carolina last season).

When UNLV and the WAC's marquee football programs formed the Mountain West Conference, it left the LV Bowl holding the WAC bag this year. So it settled for the second-place (or similar) team out of the MWC (which was scrambling just as hard for postseason assignments) against the WAC co-champ.

The conference tie-ins aren't the only elements of the game that have changed. First, it was played on Friday night. Then it was moved to Thursday night -- better for TV ratings. Then it was switched to late Saturday afternoon -- still OK for TV but a tad warmer for local fans.

Forrest Gump was wrong. It's the life of the Las Vegas Bowl that is like a box of chocolates, because you never know what you're going to get.

And this year's game between Fresno State of the WAC and Utah of the MWC is shaping up as a chocolate-covered mess.

At first, the guys and gals in the LV Bowl blazers thought they had an ideal matchup. Fresno is renowned for traveling well -- so well, in fact, that the bowl committee thought it could take a more deserving Utah team, rather than noted (only?) Mountain Time Zone force Brigham Young. The Utes beat the Cougars on the last weekend of the regular season and deserve to be here.

But all those pickup trucks that were supposed to transport Bulldogs fans to and from Las Vegas instead will be used to haul around produce this weekend. Fresno fans aren't buying tickets for this one, claiming that playing Utah feels too much like a WAC game.

And they're right.

If the Las Vegas Bowl is going to grow into a semi-major bowl, here's what it should do:

* Don't re-up with the WAC.

* Cut a deal to match the Mountain West champ (if you can't outbid the Liberty Bowl, you may as well be in the Weed Eater business) against a team from one of the power conferences (Big Ten, SEC, etc. -- the type of programs that might even entice local fans to buy a ticket). That will become more realistic once the LV Bowl ...

* Sweetens the pot. When its current contract with ESPN expires Saturday night, the LV Bowl should seek more TV money and use it to attract a team with a rep.

Barring these steps, it might take BYU's presence on an annual basis to make the game work. Or having the smarts to extend the Cougars an invitation when they're longing for one.